Importance of SEO

What is SEO? and Why is SEO So Important?

What is SEO?

What is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the process of optimizing, or maximizing your webpages, and the linking structure of other webpages, which link to your webpage in such a way that the search engines give you higher rankings for your chosen keywords.

Why Is SEO So Important?

So why is SEO so important? Millions of people daily search for information on the search engines. For any given search term, there are anywhere from a few hundred to a few million search results that reference that given search term. Generally speaking, the search results are designed to be ranked in the order of their relevance to the searcher's search term, or keyword (or keyword phrase).

Most people, when searching for a keyword or keyword phrase, will click on one of top 10 search results on the first page of the search results, or will initiate another search. Therefore in order to gain a reasonable amount of search engine traffic, a website should appear in the top 10 search results for a given keyword. Given the fact that there are for some keywords millions, literally millions of websites having some relevance to the keyword, it can often be a difficult feat, if not almost impossible, to get your webpage in the first 10 search results for a given keyword.

However, by learning the techniques by which the search engines decide which webpages should show in the top 10 search results of a given keyword or keyword phrase, and by optimizing your Web site, in such a way that your website outperforms other websites or webpages in the search engines algorithms, you can literally send your website or webpage to the top 10 search results in the search engines, surpassing many other webpages and websites, if you know what to do.

Many of the guidance, tutorials and information on SEO, in my opinion, are overloaded with far too much detail, and multiple things to do to obtain good search engine rankings without indicating which few of those things to do are actually relevant and necessary to get the top 10 search engine rankings. My personal opinion is that the reason for this is that most of the producers of SEO information are geared towards selling SEO products, software, and advanced tools. By making SEO out to be something very difficult for the average webmaster to perform, it makes their products, software and advanced tools more salable.

However, I believe that SEO can be done in the average webmaster or the average Internet Web business owner with relatively little effort, if the basic tools are understood.

In the past, I have avoided writing on the SEO topic, because in a lot of ways it deviates for my specialization, which is list building an article marketing. However, I am appalled at the lack of good SEO information and have therefore decided to write this short book to teach you what I have learned in the last six months that has enabled me to drive massive traffic to various websites and web pages.

Gear Up Your Site For Social Media Marketing : By Deepak Dutta

The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interactions on more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of your site.

Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.

You don't have to change your site completely within a month or so to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally throughout the year and you will be on your way to meet these new challenges.

The first step is to declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don't like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and list your achievements and skills.

Create a MySpace page and link your bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Install free blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us . This is done by providing an action button for each article on your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.

Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don't delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.

If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers draw their attention.

Publish all your feeds at Feedburner . Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video . Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable.

Provide embedded links to your posted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites.

Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

For starters, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons that adds links to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo action buttons use del.icio.us for social bookmarking and the Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers' experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic to your site.

About The Author:
Dr. Deepak Dutta is the creator of http://www.semanticbay.com - an interactive social network website based on user shared text and picture contents on any topics. His other website http://www.classifiedsforfree.com - is one of the oldest online classifieds sites where users can post ads in more than 600 US cities and 60 countries.

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