Techniques of Search Engine Optimization for your Blog ( part1 )

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is a way of getting your website to the top of the search engines so people can find your company easier and faster. Think about this for a moment... If your website is the first listing to display after entering a key word, you could be receiving hundreds- even thousands- of visitors for free! SEO can save you money on advertising, and should be a primary focus in your marketing arsenal.

Recognize the Top Search Engines

In order for your website to get to the top of the search engines, you'll want to know top ranking search engines:
• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN
• YouTube

Conduct SEO Research

• Use Relevant SEO Keywords: To see what your visitors are actually searching for, use WordTracker or the Google AdWords tool, enter a keyword you think people are searching for in the search box, and click enter. Make a note of the keywords with more than ten searches per day; anything less isn't a fishing hole, it's a puddle.

• Analyze Competition: Visit a search engine and search for your key words in quotes. Determine:
- How many competitors are there (less than 5,000 in quotes is good)
- How many words are in bold (do your competitors use the keywords on their webpages)
- The quality of your competitors websites ("Bob's Blog "or the New York Times?)
• Find an underserved Niche Market: If you have competitive keywords, try to create a niche market by focusing on regions and specialized terms.

How Search Engines Work

Before we get into SEO practices, you need to have a basic understanding of how search engines work.

1. Get crawled: Search engines send out programs known as Spiders to "crawl" or scan your webpages to determine if the information is valuable (original content and linked to by other websites). If it is valuable, the webpage will be added to the Search Engine Index - all the webpages that display in the search engines.

2. Get Indexed: If your pages were crawled and added to the Search Engine Index, the information will show up in the search results. Only webpages that are indexed will show up in the search results. Notice I said webpages, not websites. Most websites-especially large ones- will not have every page indexed. There are simply too many pages of information for the search engines to effectively store them all, so they have to be picky.

In a nutshell, your goals are the following:
• Invite spiders to crawl your website
• Convince them to index your webpages, and
• Show up on the first page of the search engine for your keyword

Sounds easy, huh? Well, the first two are... You can have that done within a matter of hours by submitting a sitemap (which we'll get to in a second). Moving up in the search rankings, however, is a long-term -dare I say ongoing- battle. How do websites move to the top of the search results? They make it simple for search engines to read their site (known as "on-page optimization") while increasing the quantity and quality of websites that link to them (known as "off-page optimization.")