Search Engine Optimization

The majority of searches worldwide are conducted on 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN).

The goal of the search engines is to provide the most relevant information to its users. It's in the best interests of the search engines to be relevant because if the information returned is not, the web user will use a different search engine. This is the primary way that Google has become the number 1 search engine. They have stressed quality of searches over anything else.

Even with their main revenue source, Adwords, they have constantly changed the parameters that advertisers must follow in order to get the highest ranking ad and the lowest price per click. They have risked alienating their advertisers in order to make sure that people who search for a topic or click on an ad are brought to the most relevant webpage first and foremost.

How Anyone Can Improve Their Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are basic ways that a webpage can be "optimized":

* Be "keyword rich" with your keywords listed many times throughout your site

* Have your main keywords in bold a few times

* Use the , tags to include a highly relevant keyword, title, and description of your site. (an understanding of HTML coding helps)

PageRank is a series of algorithms that was invented in 1998 and is constantly evolving.

....Google's description of PageRank:

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes or links a page receives; it also analyzes the pages that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important'."

PageRank (from here on I will refer to it as PR) works on a scale from 0 - 10, with 0 being lowest and 10 being highest. The higher your PR is, the more authoritative your site is, or at least it has more sites linking to it than another page that is ranked lower.

Each website that links to you will give you "credit" for being associated with a website with PR (if they have any) and vice versa. The higher the PR of the website that links to you, the more importance Google gives to it.

Most websites have the highest PR on their homepage because that's where the majority of their incoming links point to. A common theme is that a website will have a high PR on their homepage, but low or no PR on most of their internal pages. It is also important to have links to other pages on your site, called "deep links". Google really likes this too and rewards you with a good PR.

How do I get onto the first page of Google?

No offense, but if I knew that I'd be rich! Seriously, there are ways to greatly improve your chances:

1. "Content is King"

* If your website doesn't have quality information that is highly relevant to the keywords associated with the site, you will not get a good PR

1. Incoming Links

* Google highly ranks pages that have many "one-way" incoming links to the page. This usually means that other sites or blogs also find the information you present relevant

1. Authority

* This refers to how important your website is rated from other search engines. Plus the PR of sites linking to you is extremely important.

If you would like to get higher search engine rankings I suggest you start to learn about how to optimize your content and how to get quality links to your site.

A word about incoming links: A link is a link is not always true.

* Try to get incoming links from high PR sites even if you must pay for them. They are worth the money.

* Visit forums related to your site and post comments with your web address

* Contact related sites, usually by email, and ask to link with them. You will be asked to include their link on your site as well

* Link brokers. Sometimes a pain but they can provide you with many more links in a shorter time than you can ever do it yourself.

Good luck!

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