Posts Tagged Search Engines

When Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is done properly, your website can pay you very rich dividends. When it is not done correctly, that same website is like a palm tree in the desert. It looks wonderful, but no one knows it’s there. More pointedly, potential customers can’t find you and will be forced to spend their money elsewhere.

Here are 5 quick tips to help get your website headed in the right direction, so you can reap the rewards and increase your company’s bottom line.

1.     Keyword Research - Think of keywords in terms of what you or your customers type into a search engine to find your product or services. Your website’s content should be keyword rich for both search engines and web visitors. Google provides a free keyword research tool. It will show you the most popular keywords for your industry. You can find it at http://bit.ly/p0N6OY.
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Meet the “robots.txt” File

When a search engine spider first arrives at a website, the spider looks for the “robots.txt” file. This is a text file that resides on the web server at the hosted domain. The “robots.txt” file has specific instructions for the search engine spider such as which parts of the site should or should not be indexed into their database.

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When it comes to the topic of search engine optimization (SEO), there tends to be a lot of confusion. You here all kinds of conversations on varying opinions about how to rank higher in the organic or free listings. Some SEOs even claim to know the Google ranking algorithm inside and out or Matt Cutts personally. The topic of SEO carries a certain mystique about it, even amongst SEOs.

It is true that there are technical details to SEO, but the true magic to SEO is really not that difficult at all. SEO breaks down into 2 basic categories which are on page optimization and off page optimization. On page optimization has to do with how the search engine’s view your site and off page optimization is how other sites link to you. This is commonly known in SEO circles as backlinks.

What the search engines do not want is for you to try to trick them. They do not want you gaming their system or manipulating their search results in anyway. If you try to deceive them, they will penalize you. Their are right and wrong ways to go about optimizing your site for the search engines and in this series on SEO we are going to set the record straight when it comes to all things SEO.

If you play by the search engines rules, all will go well but if you choose to try to game them, you risk losing all that you have worked for. You must know that there is no magic bullet when it comes to SEO, but if you execute solid SEO principles, you can obtain a coveted top ranking in the search engines.

I remember when I first switched over to Google as my search engine of choice. This was in the early 2000s. I had regularly used Yahoo to that point, but I would often find myself having to run different queries in order to get what I was after. Basically, they were not delivering the results that I was looking for.  Thus, began my dabbling with other search engines of the day.

What I loved about Google (and still do) is that they more often understood my intent the first time around when I searched, and I also liked their no nonsense interface that was not all cluttered with ads and news items. The accuracy of their search results outperformed the other search engines and this is what has kept me and many others hooked on Google to this day.

With Google Caffeine, Google has taken a step further in understanding a searcher’s intent by delivering what is known as blended results. Blended search results are nothing new, but now Google has perfected them a bit more. With the new Google SERP, you can now be shown images, news, twitter posts, Google Products, videos and related searches based on your query. Google is also more quickly sifting through the value of Social Media sites by delivering the most relevant sites higher in their SERPS for a given topic.

Google is not just providing their search results faster. They are also providing relevant results faster for your search. This helps Google keep the Lion’s share of  the searches performed by end users.