A massive amount of the Internet's traffic is filtered through search engines. Almost everyone – including, I'm sure, yourself – uses search engines many times every day. Firing up Google is simply the most practical way to find information on the Internet.
That's the number one reason why you should make the study and acquisition of search traffic a priority: search engines push more readers around than any other type of web service.
So how do you tap into this vast flood of traffic? The practice of designing your site so that it ranks well in search is called search engine optimization (SEO). It involves a broad spectrum of tactics, from designating specific heading tags to fulfill different SEO roles, to using the right anchor text when linking to your own site.
While for many blog owners SEO is something that is mostly for their web developer, it's still useful to have at least a broad understanding of how it works.
Search engine optimization is basically about setting up your site so it has a structure that search engines can understand. Crawlers use a few methods to determine which keywords have priority, including heading tags (the <h1> tag will give keywords more weight than <h2> or <h3>, and so on), keyword density, alt text on images, and a whole lot more.
The best SEO is about conforming to the best practices of well-structured websites, and choosing your audience and topic wisely. Many people get caught up in SEO as some sort of magical pill that'll make your site instantly popular.
As with any field, your best bet will be to use a professional, but because so many people want magical results, the unscrupulous and unethical scammer is a mainstay of the search engine optimization industry. It's important to be careful when hiring a specialist, or you may end up wasting money on a scammer or what's known as a "blackhat SEO" specialist: someone who will use exploits to get a better ranking quicker – exploits that will have you penalized if you're caught.
Let me address two issues that are very important for those in the web publishing business. The short version is: don't let others reprint articles that have been published on your site elsewhere on the Internet. By all means you can resell the content for offline use – say, to a print magazine – but it's never a good idea to allow the original content on your site to be duplicated word-for-word on another site.
Google, and perhaps other search engines, may penalize you for hosting content that's been duplicated on the web if they can't determine that you were the first to post it. And penalties aside, it wouldn't be a happy ending for you if the other site managed to overtake your post in the search rankings just because it has a few more readers and backlinks. Keep content unique and original when it comes to the web.
Don't write for the search engines. You can spot a site that's been written for the search engines very quickly, and I know that my own reaction is to leave immediately. I'm sure most people do the same thing.
Your readers are human. It's an obvious statement, but one that people forget all too frequently. Write for the humans while using the best practices that make your site accessible to search engine crawlers, and you'll do well in the long-run. If you can fit some keywords into your post without affecting the quality of your title or post, great! Do it. But be careful to remember where the line is, and stay on the right side of it.
Most search engines are complicated systems, using mysterious algorithms that nobody outside of the search companies have ever seen. The details of the algorithms aside, the way they find and sort information – at least from a bird's eye view – is quite simple:
Crawling - Spiders are automated systems that search engines use to "crawl" the web, checking each link they come across and finding new sites for the search engine to list.
Indexing - After the spider has crawled a page, that page becomes part of the Google index and the content of the page is analyzed for the purposes of ranking.
Ranking - The way search engines use algorithms to rank content is the aforementioned complicated and mysterious part of the system. The words on the page, the structure of the site, the number of links referring to the site, and many more factors all come into play to determine which keyword searches will return the page as a result, and how high up in the results the site will be. When we optimize our sites, we seek to improve our chances of ranking higher for the keywords we think our target audience will be using.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Ethan C. Moore at 02172011
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