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Search Engine Optimization - The Basics
What is search engine optimization?
For any online store, it is critical to have a strong search engine optimization (SEO) program. By taking the time to implement a smart program, you can position yourself light-years ahead of your competition.
As your SEO rankings improve and more traffic flows to your online store for free, you are actively attracting customers on the cheap! You can generate more profits and have more marketing dollars to use for your other customer acquisition efforts such as pay-per-click, direct marketing, etc.
It’s important for you to get serious about your SEO efforts. Currently, most customers begin their shopping experiences at search engines. The major search engines are Google (the 800-lb gorilla), Yahoo, MSN and AOL. According to recent reports, approximately 60-70% of all search traffic goes through Google with Yahoo next at around 20% and MSN and AOL around 8-10% each.
Although there is a shift in shopping behavior as Social Networking (e.g. Facebook, MySpace) and Social Shopping (e.g. ThisNext) have begun to be more of a starting point for a customer’s shopping session, these still pale in comparison to the volume of search engine traffic.
A recent study from Jupiter Media stated that 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases came from organic searches versus paid online ads.
Search engine optimization aims to achieve the goal of getting high rankings from search engines is through organic searches. Search engines evaluate websites by using what they call “spiders.” These programs scan the websites and collects information about them. They then collate the information and pass it on to the search engine.
Over the years, search engines began using more complex algorithms which took into consideration other factors such as the text that is contained within page titles, the domain name, file and folder names, keyword proximity and other such factors. Although the search engine algorithms are trade secrets unknown to any outside company, SEO experts know several other on-site factors (internal links, page content, recent content) and off-site factors (quality inbound links, anchor tags) are becoming increasingly important to a search engine’s quality score for your online store.
Today, newly developed websites don’t even need to submit to the search engines to be noticed. Spiders today are capable of tracking down websites even through links that are in the website. The use of a site map or well-placed links can help the spiders to navigate the online store.
Search Engine Optimization: Art and Science:
To be able to appreciate the beauty of the art and science of search engine optimization, one must be able to understand how search engines work. Although each search engine is secretive about their algorithm details, there are some widely-accepted and publicly expressed algorithm fundamentals:
- Search engines rank websites in different ways - search engines use “spiders” and “robots” to be able to assess the contents of a website and they then relay the information to the main search engine system to provide better search engine results.
- On-site AND Off-site factors are big contributing factors to a page’s ranking.
- New content is now loved – this was not always the case.
White Hat vs. Black Hat Techniques:
While “black hat SEO” makes use of unethical methods to manipulate listings and to deceive others, “white hat SEO” focuses on honest methods of improving a website and its contents in order to promote it in the Internet much better.
Examples of Black Hat techniques include:
- “Keyword stuffing” - this means employing the use of the same or exact “keywords” in your “META tags” or anywhere in your content repeatedly.
- Hidden links and text - Search engines work by scanning pages for certain keywords which are submitted into a search request and display results where the exact keyword appears typically, on a “page”. Webmasters then insert some links or texts that are only readable by search engines but can not be seen by the human eye. You can, for instance, put a white link or text with the appropriate keywords unto a certain web page with also a white background. Individuals can not detect it and will not even notice the difference; however “spiders” can read it and rank that site higher.
- “Mirror websites” - these are several sites having identical contents but different “URL”, all linking to one another, constructed for a very cruel objective.
- “Doorway pages” - normally, these are pages of poor quality constructed to rank highly particularly for one or even more selected keywords. These do not affect your website visitors and only constructed for search engines.
- Cloaking - delivers many different web pages for search engines and visitors. Webmasters construct their servers so that it can identify “IP addresses” of spiders then provide them with content rich and optimized pages, at the same time displaying different web pages for individuals. Cloaking can likewise redirect a web visitor to their home page.
- “Link farms” - Purposely to acquire link popularity, link farms are typically one page consisting of fifty up to one hundred or even more links to certain websites having no similarities with your website’s content. Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methods of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.
Please keep your “hat” as white as possible. If you tip your “hat” either accidentally or on purpose to the dark side, your online store most likely get reported (by your competitors) or penalized by the search engines. Don’t do it!
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