It’s just temporary of course. So you gather up your strength and hold your chin up high. You’ll have Google chasing you back. After all, you’re armed with some hardcore search engine flirtation tips.

1) Go bold. Just as women love bold suitors, so do search engines. Start highlighting keywords on each page with the B tag to increase search relevance. Search engines are attracted to words contained in the H1 and B tags. Just don’t go wild- two bold words per page is enough.

2) Go Deeper. Having other sites drill deep into your web at various locations tells google that ‘hey, this guy has varied useful content’. It’s poor SEO strategy to acquire links just to link to the homepage. The search engines may ultimately discount those links

3) Go foreign. Why focus on North America? You can take your business to India, Pakistan, UK and Hongkong! Start creating pages for lucrative markets and submit to their local directories. This ensures multiple streams of revenue

4) Fire Up Newsletters. Provide articles to publishers like ezinearticles. The links breathe for many years in their archives and funnel backlinks to your site.

5) Go Bi. Image links are good, but text links are more appreciated. If your site is full of image links, have your webmaster place the text links first because that’s what google looks for. Subsequent links are often discounted.

6) Multiple Partners. Create different domains on varying IPs that talk about similar subjects. The reason is that Google only lists one domain page per search result. Imagine if you owned ten domains that came up for the same search result? You’ll be seducing more curious searchers. Another tip: search engine consulting firms recommend varying the keywords used on these domains just to minimize looking spammy.

7) Article Exchanges. You’ve heard of reciprocal link exchanges. Text link purchases. One way backlink purchases. Try them, and it’s like getting herpes on the net. Google blacklists you and your worth is downgraded. But article exchanges are different. Whip up an article, upload to Ezinearcticles and before you know it- wham! Dozens of sites publish your article and bring fawning admirers to your door.

8) Shun Unvaried Anchor Text. If 1000 sites links to you with the appellation “Gimme Money”, Google starts to squint and dig deeper, “Smells like automated filthy spam, methinks.” Avoid the search engine ban by varying the anchor text. Dance under different names and you’ll flirt more grandly with search engines.

9) Expose Your Glory With a Site map. Your visitors reach the honeypot more rapidly when you have a structured sitemap that links to every major page. Keep the map on a location easily accessible so you keep the action flowing. Google bots flirt with sitemaps too and often births detailed search results. So keep it search engine friendly.

The bottom line is that companies must figure out how to best adjust their Internet marketing strategy, which includes but is not limited to website optimization (SEO), paid search (SEM), email marketing, Web 2.0 & social media optimization, link building, and affiliate marketing strategies to maintain a competitive advantage. The best way to achieve this is to focus the right balance of your resources on standard text optimization as well as the optimization and promotion of all other digital assets. You might be asking yourself – when is it the right time to start making this shift? The answer is simple – right now! The search engines already have their systems in place to measure the relevancy of a website’s digital assets and they are constantly focusing on improving these systems and making them a more prevalent part of their search systems. The only question is how long it will take for the users to fully realize that they have these resources at their disposal.

Both Google’s Universal Search and the new Ask3D interface show users more information from more sources (news, images, products, video, etc) in the first page of results than we have ever seen before. This shift in how search engines present the search results illustrates the need to consider more media types than standard text documents. The growth of Universal search means the kinds of search results SEO consultants have become accustomed to and have been optimizing for are either on the way out or on the decline. Figuring out new ways to optimize any electronic file that can be crawled, indexed, categorized and sorted is where the opportunity lies. This is about a lot more than just optimizing social media, it’s about “the big picture”, having the ability to optimize the Internet as a whole, making all content easier to find via search rather than simply having to rely on the text within the website. These days it is becoming more common for businesses to produce an array of different content types, and search engines are doing their best to index that content. A search engines success is directly related to its ability to adapt to changes in the market, this means that those of us who use these search engines to market our websites must adapt as well. With such intense competition, and so much money at stake, the leading search providers will continue to make the user experience better thus making it easier to find whatever it is we seek.

The trend in search is shifting from optimizing for a slow, one-dimensional engine, and is moving towards a highly sophisticated integration of elements, including image, video, consumer reviews, social networks, social ratings, podcasts, and much more. This means we must begin to adjust what needs to be optimized from the platform to the actual asset itself. This is what makes DAO the future of Internet marketing. DAO views the platform as merely the vehicle which carries the content directly to the searcher, as opposed to SEO which focuses almost solely on bringing the platform (a website) to the searcher, and waiting (or hoping) for the searcher to discover the content. For example, by understanding how videos can be optimized, a search campaign can be successful on Google or YouTube. We no longer need to use text optimization as the only method to reach potential visitors, all the while hoping that once they arrive the more “sophisticated” content will actually close the deal. So, the future of SEO as defined today is destined to change. The days of success being optimization for 10 text links on a standard results page will be over soon.

So long as billions of people continue to use search engines on a daily basis, there will be progression in the modes of optimization we use to improve a websites visibility to the search engines, helping to enhance their presence on the Internet. Companies need to consider all of the digital assets that they have to work with in order to give both the search engines and the customers the information they’re looking for in the formats they’ll respond to. Optimizing comprehensively starts with an inventory of a company’s digital assets. Text, images, audio and video should all be considered when determining what we need to optimize, we no longer need to wait for the customer to find us through our use of text optimization so we can impress them with our other digital assets. Matching digital assets with channels of distribution provides marketers with even more opportunity to reach customers since each channel can drive traffic independently as well as improve a websites standard search visibility. Digital asset optimization is not just a better definition of the future of search marketing; it is the future of search marketing.

Yahoo! is much better at displaying all the links to a site however even this has it’s shortcomings in the analysis process. Secondly, the number of links is only a fraction of what’s important in their development.

To fully grasp how your competitors are ranking highly for your targeted phrases you will want to know a number of things about the links to their site including:

• how many links do they have?
• How many of these links come from the same sites?
• Are these sites relevant?
• What is the PageRank distribution of the links?
• Are these links image or text links and if text,
• what anchor text is used to link to your competitor’s site?

Why Are These Factors Important?

These factors are important as they define the value of the link. To put it simply: the high value of link means that your Home Business Start site is of high value.
The number of links is perhaps the least important of these factors. A site can have 10,000 incoming links and if they are all from a single unrelated site with a low PageRank then the value of these links is negligible.

Knowing how many of the links to your competitor’s site come from the same site or sites will let you know where they have bought advertising and also help isolate weakness in their link counts.

Multiple links from the same website are not given the same value as multiple links from different websites. If your competitors have thousands of incoming links that come from 5 different websites you have far less work to do that if they even had a couple hundred, all from different sites.

The relevancy of the incoming links is extremely important and gaining importance every update.

Unfortunately this is also the hardest factor to gauge as, “what constitutes relevancy?” and, “how exactly do I find out if my competitors links are relevant without visiting every one of their links?” can be problematic questions.

Gauging relevancy can generally be done with a simple thought: if I am on a site and the link makes sense to be there (for example, a web design company linking to a web hosting company) then it can be considered relevant.
Basically, if there are people who will actually click the link then it is relevant. Finding out if your competitor’s links are relevant without visiting every one of their link partners is a different hurdle to jump.

Rather than visiting each-and-every link it is easier view only the most important ones; that would be the ones from high PageRank pages. But how does one do that?

It is very energy-saving to use a top-software (see below) to tear apart the external factors our main competitors are using to hold top ten positions.

While in on page optimization it was possible to note that there are other tools out there that break down keyword density elements, I am not able to do the same with offsite optimization factors.
Once you have optimized the onsite factors from part one of SEO process it’s time to launch into the external factors. External SEO factors generally refer to the internal links to your, and your competitor’s Home Business Start sites.

Yahoo! is much better at displaying all the links to a site however even this has it’s shortcomings in the analysis process. Secondly, the number of links is only a fraction of what’s important in their development.

To fully grasp how your competitors are ranking highly for your targeted phrases you will want to know a number of things about the links to their site including:

• how many links do they have?
• How many of these links come from the same sites?
• Are these sites relevant?
• What is the PageRank distribution of the links?
• Are these links image or text links and if text,
• what anchor text is used to link to your competitor’s site?

Why Are These Factors Important?

These factors are important as they define the value of the link. To put it simply: the high value of link means that your Home Business Start site is of high value.
The number of links is perhaps the least important of these factors. A site can have 10,000 incoming links and if they are all from a single unrelated site with a low PageRank then the value of these links is negligible.

Knowing how many of the links to your competitor’s site come from the same site or sites will let you know where they have bought advertising and also help isolate weakness in their link counts.

Multiple links from the same website are not given the same value as multiple links from different websites. If your competitors have thousands of incoming links that come from 5 different websites you have far less work to do that if they even had a couple hundred, all from different sites.

The relevancy of the incoming links is extremely important and gaining importance every update.

Unfortunately this is also the hardest factor to gauge as, “what constitutes relevancy?” and, “how exactly do I find out if my competitors links are relevant without visiting every one of their links?” can be problematic questions.

Gauging relevancy can generally be done with a simple thought: if I am on a site and the link makes sense to be there (for example, a web design company linking to a web hosting company) then it can be considered relevant.
Basically, if there are people who will actually click the link then it is relevant. Finding out if your competitor’s links are relevant without visiting every one of their link partners is a different hurdle to jump.

Rather than visiting each-and-every link it is easier view only the most important ones; that would be the ones from high PageRank pages. But how does one do that?

It is very energy-saving to use a top-software (see below) to tear apart the external factors our main competitors are using to hold top ten positions.

While in on page optimization it was possible to note that there are other tools out there that break down keyword density elements, I am not able to do the same with offsite optimization factors.
Once you have optimized the onsite factors from part one of SEO process it’s time to launch into the external factors. External SEO factors generally refer to the internal links to your, and your competitor’s Home Business Start sites.

SEO continues to be the talk of the town.

“Are reciprocal links good? Are one-way links better? How do I use Google SiteMap Submission? Does PageRank still count? How many blogs do I need? Who has a bigger index – Yahoo or Google? And does it matter? Which engine is more popular – Yahoo or Google, oh wait I heard MSN is gaining ground. Is it MSN?”

OK, I’m sure you see my point – there seem to be more questions out there than answers. And then if you do get answers, they sometimes conflict with what another SEO firm told you already or what you read in an article last month, or what your friend’s little brother did on his site that made him rich overnight. (Don’t laugh; we hear those stories all the time)

I’m here to answer these questions, in total and complete honesty. Are you ready? The answer is actually simple and applies to ALL of the questions above as well as any other question you may ask.

The answer is:

It doesn’t matter… because you are asking the wrong question!

OK, so what is the right question?

Don’t worry – I will tell you – the question is: Are you in the 64% or the 36% group?

Now for the answer …

I Don’t Know…Only You Know the Answer (and have to deal with the results).

Let me explain….

There was recently a study on the results of company’s outsourcing SEO (September 2005, by Jupiter). The results may seem shocking, but it is something we see every day in this business.

The study shows that 64% of companies that choose to outsource their SEO do not follow the instructions of the SEO firm they hired! I am going to repeat that again so the full impact reaches you — 64% of companies that choose to outsource their SEO do not follow the instructions of the SEO firm they hired!

They recognize the need for traffic (OK, off to a good start). They did their research and selected a company (nice, moving forward) and they plunk down the money (and if it’s an SEO company that’s any good, it wasn’t just pennies either). So far it all sounds good. What happens next -

it all falls apart.

The SEO Firm does their analysis of your site and situation, they share with you the most basic items to be fixed (which are often easy to fix with just a little attention) – they tell you this is of the utmost importance, it is the foundation of your whole campaign.

And what do you do?

That depends – are you in the 64% that does nothing and ends up asking all the wrong questions and whining months later when you are still nowhere? Or are you in the 36% that take action, treats their website and their business with the seriousness and commitment it deserves and then get to work with the SEO company to open the floodgates of traffic SEO can deliver? It’s simple and it’s your choice.

After you have made the commitment to be one of the 36% (something to ponder: how many of your competitors are in the 64% asking the wrong questions and doing nothing – and how quickly can you by-pass them when you are one of the 36% doing it right?) and you have taken the steps necessary to lay the foundation for a solid SEO campaign, you can then sit back and watch the company you hired, with their proven expertise bring in the rankings you desire.

Please understand, I write this article with a little humor to show the absurdity of the situation. I mean, would you hire a mechanic and then refuse to fix what he determined is the problem? No – you probably wouldn’t. I want you to understand not following your SEO Firm’s instructions can be just as detrimental to your business as ignoring a mechanic’s suggestion to fix that smoke coming out of the engine can be to your car.

The more SEO changes, the more it stays the same. The SEO winners are not the ones chasing each new trend and asking the wrong questions. The winners are the ones that commit to their SEO firm and their own business and follow the guidance of the firm they hired. They follow those firms right to top rankings.

So, now that you have asked the right question, made a commitment to the growth of your business and have an SEO firm diligently working for you, and you are just sitting back waiting for the results – you can ponder all you like the details of who’s database is bigger – Yahoo or Google or MSN, as well as all the questions out there people ask daily.

However, with the right SEO Firm – you still don’t need to ask these questions. Questions like is PageRank still important, how many blogs do I need and how do I use them, and all the others will all be answered. The answer will be in the results the firm got for you based on your cooperation and their knowledge and expertise.

Forget Desperate Housewives – try Desperate SEO Firms – with 64% of clients NOT doing what it takes, no wonder there are rumors of SEO insanity out there. Gain some sanity and take action today to make sure you can ask and answer the right question correctly.

Ranking Algorithms

You may have heard of ranking algorithms when you were researching search engine trends and optimization techniques. These algorithms are mathematical formulas that search engines use to determine how Web pages are indexed in their databases. These algorithms also help to determine how Web pages are ranked in the results for specific keyword searches. Each of the search engines has its own specific ranking algorithm, but the actual formulas are kept confidential by each individual search engine company.

Because these algorithms have the power to change Web rankings and the way people do business, they are kept from other companies to protect the business interests of each search engine. Even though you don’t know exactly what these formulas are, there are guidelines for each search engine that you can follow to improve your rankings.

Ranking algorithms differ for each search engine, so you can use one search engine and then use a second search engine for the same keyword and get completely different results. This is why you need to have a wide range of search engine optimization techniques in place to optimize your Web site for the best results across all of the search engines.

If you heavily optimize your site for one search engine, you will lose traffic on other search engines. If you optimize your site for the top search engine, you may be able to get away with very little optimization for the other search engines.

All of this will depend on how the search engines are ranking sites when you are optimizing your site. You will also have to keep up with the major search engine trends after you initially optimize your site so you know what changes need to be made.

Off-page optimization has become increasingly more important because of the changes in search engine optimization. Many people involved in the SEO community have learned how to optimize their pages so the search engines started to place increasingly more importance on off-page optimization.

Off-page optimization means that you will have to work on optimizing your site without actually using the pages of your site for optimization purposes. One of the best tools for off-page optimization is link building. Link building means that you are building links from other Web sites to your own site. One-way links are the most valuable since they show that other Web site owners find the information on your site to be relevant or important.

Some of the bigger search engines determine the popularity of the Web sites that are ranked well in the results for specific keywords. If a well-ranked site is not getting much traffic from the search results, the search engines will decrease the rank of this site because Web users have shown it to be an irrelevant or useless site.

If a site that is not ranked as well in the search engines gets a lot of traffic, the search engines may elevate the rank of the site. Users who keep visiting the site despite its low rank are showing the search engines that the site’s information is very important and relevant to the keywords used in Web searches returning that particular site in the rankings.

The Importance of Google

If you have a small search engine optimization budget, you may be wondering if it’s really necessary to optimize your site for all of the search engines. While optimizing your site for all of the search engines will give you the best results, targeting the major search engines can help you to optimize your site for the smaller search engines at the same time.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are known as the major search engines and they are in constant competition with each other to improve the way information is returned every time someone searches for a particular word or phrase. Google is the most important of these search engines, and the Google organization has changed the way users get information with their innovative search techniques and complementary services.

In addition to the search engine services it provides, Google also offers Google Scholar, Google Earth, Google Checkout, G-mail, and a number of other services for Web users. Google Scholar allows users to search for information in scholarly publications. This is an excellent tool for anyone writing a thesis, dissertation, or article for publication.

Google Earth is Google’s way of getting involved with satellite photographs. Users can search for photographs taken by satellites. Google Checkout is Google’s new payment processing system that is closely linked with major retailers, making it the online shopping experience for convenient. G-mail is Google’s e-mails service that has a very large storage capacity, making it the first choice for users who want to take advantage of the almost 3 GB inbox size.

Google PageRank

Google PageRank (PR) is a statistical tool that can be used by Web marketers to determine how their site is perceived in the online community. Google creates this statistic using a mathematical formula that takes the number of links to and from your Web site into consideration and comes up with the PR number.

When other Web site owners link to your site, Google interprets each link as a “vote” for your site. This allows Web users to contribute to the popularity of a site. The quality of the links to your site is just as important, if not more important, than the number of links to your site. If a Web site linking to you has a PR of 8 and 200 outgoing links, this may slightly help your PR.

If a site linking to you only has a PR of 6 but only has 10 links, this will be more helpful. Because the site has few outgoing links, Google assumes that your site is important because they used one of their few links to drive viewers to your site.

Checking your PageRank is easy using a tool called PR Checker. You simply enter your Web address and your PR will be displayed in a matter of seconds. If you find that your PR is low, you can attempt to increase it by building links and employing other SEO strategies.

The Sandbox Effect

Because Google is so important in the world of search engines, it has had a strong effect on how Web pages are indexed and ranked in the search engine results. This importance has resulted in an effect that is often called the Sandbox Effect. This effect refers to the period of time that Web site owners must wait before being ranked by the search engines. This period can be anywhere from 3 months to 6 months and this time is often used to see if each new Web site can survive without rankings.

If a Web site is not ranked but still has significant traffic, it means that the information and tools on the site must be worthwhile enough to attract visitors without using the search engines to generate traffic. If a Web site is able to stay afloat before it is ranked, Google assumes that the content is important enough to allow the Web site to be ranked for its specific keywords and phrases.

Duplicate Web Content

There is a lot of information about the duplicate content penalty on the Internet, but there are just as many web sites that are devoted to proving the rumor to be false. Duplicate content is when you use content that is already on the Web to populate your web site with information.

Doing this is easy as it saves you time and money on writing your own articles, but if the search engines penalize you for duplicate content, you could be derailing your own SEO efforts. According to those who promote the existence of a duplicate content penalty, search engines have a filter that is used when duplicate content is detected. If your content is ignored by the search engines, you’re not going to improve your rankings and you may not even get anywhere near the top 10 of the results.

Having your own unique content is important for many reasons beyond the threat of a penalty for duplicate content. Writing your own content can position you as an expert in your field. Visitors will be much more impressed with your qualifications if you provide original content than they will be by visiting your web site and finding the same article they just read 10 minutes ago.

Having unique content on your web site can also help you improve your SEO efforts because other sites will want to link to your original information. Would you rather link to someone who has original ideas and a wealth of information on their web site, or to a web site that has the same content as 10 other sites? That’s how other people think and you’ll benefit from this thinking when they see that you have a ton of fresh content just waiting to be read by people all over the Web.

Another reason that adding unique content to your site on a regular basis is important is because it can help you to improve your search engine rankings. Search engines send crawlers out to look for information at designated intervals. If you update your web site, a crawler may visit it and gather the new information for indexing. This can help to improve your search engine ranking.

If you have a web site, newsletter, e-zine, tip sheet, or other information product, you’re going to want to have unique content. This can help to build your subscriber list to your newsletter and make your products more valuable in the online marketplace. Some of the same e-books and articles have spread all over the Internet and have the same tired information that is already out of date.

If you dedicate yourself to creating unique content, you can keep up with the latest trends and give your readers exciting and relevant information that they can use in their businesses. This will solidify your reputation as an expert in your field, and can also create goodwill with your web site visitors. One final reason to avoid using duplicate content is so that you can avoid any legal claims of plagiarism or copyright violation.

Just because something is on the internet doesn’t mean it’s free to reuse or distribute. If you inadvertently distribute or use something that is protected by copyright, you may find yourself in hot water with the copyright owner.

Keeping up with search engine trends and learning how to best optimize your web site for the search engines will not only bring you additional traffic, it will also bring you more chances for sales conversions and satisfied customers. Use these techniques wisely and you’ll be able to manage a steady business for many years to come.

This is because if you can get a good pagerank for all of your inner pages, as well as your home page, it increases the chances of these pages being ranked highly in the search engines for their chosen keywords, and increases the number of visitors you could get.

So how do you achieve this? Well firstly I recommend that all of your main web pages are just one click away from your home page. You should have a well-structured navigation menu on your home page. Each link within the menu should be an anchor text link containing your main keyword(s). For example, let’s say you had an inner page about hair loss. Now you may have done keyword research and found the term “hair loss” to be too competitive, so let’s say you have decided to optimize your web page for the less competitive term “male hair loss”. In this example, your link from the navigation menu should be “male hair loss” rather than “hair loss”.

You can dramatically enhance this interlinking structure and boost the pagerank of your inner web pages further by including this navigation menu on all of your inner web pages. This means that all of your main inner web pages are always just one click away and will dramatically boost the number of inward links that each page has. This can be very powerful because with higher pagerank and more links comes higher search engine rankings, but surprisingly is something that many so-called SEO experts fail to recognize.

Another way of achieving this effect if you do not want to include a navigation menu on every page is by including a link tree on every one of your inner pages. These are those links that you often find at the bottom of pages, and are again a very good way of interlinking your web pages. As before, be sure to include your main keyword(s) within each link.

I personally include a left-hand navigation menu on all of my websites, as well as a link tree at the bottom of each web page. This ensures not only that each page of each site has the maximum number of internal inward links, which boosts my pagerank and search engine rankings, but also ensures that the visitors to the site are always just one click away from each main page of the site. This is important if they enter at one of your inner pages, because often they will then want to navigate to the home page.

To conclude, to rank highly in the search engines, you should focus on on-page optimization, and more so off-page optimization. Just as every inward link to your site from another website acts as a vote for your site, and boosts your pagerank and search engine rankings, a link from another page within your site also acts as a vote and will also have a positive effect on your ranking. A good interlinking structure within your site will ensure that every page is fully optimized and has the optimum number of links from your other pages allowing you to rank higher for all of your inner pages as well as your home page.

The higher the numbers of high PageRank links the more difficult the competition is however, once you have isolated which domains the links are coming from it is often simply a matter of visiting the site and establishing the same links to yours either through exchanges, directory listings, or other tactics.

While you are on the sites, assess whether the content is relevant. You will undoubtedly not want to visit each and every page that links to your competitors however if you visit all the top sites (i.e. PageRank 3 or higher) you will get a very solid idea of the relevancy value of the links.

Once we know the value in regards to relevancy of the content we now need to know what they’re doing in regards to transferring that relevancy along in the form of their links.

Using a tool such as I suggest below, it is simple to determine exactly what types of links are pointing to your competitors, however it is possible, though much more time-consuming, to do it manually (i.e. you will have to visit every page).

An important factor in SEO and the building of relevancy to your Home Business Start site comes in the form of anchor text. The verbiage used to link to your site, or the alt text in the event the link is an image link, can play an important role.

To illustrate this with a great example; searches on Google for “msn” results in the page www.submit-it.com in position seven. If you view the cache, rather than receiving the highlighted use of the term “msn” you receive the note that, ” These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: msn”.

The relevancy of the anchor txt in this case is so strong that this page outranks many with “msn” optimized for using onsite factors.

What Do We Know?

So what do we now know about our Home Business Start site competition?
We now know where their links are coming from, the PageRank of those links, the relevancy of the top links, the anchor text and/or alt tags used to link to your competitors’ sites, and how many of those are multiple links from the same site.

Basically, combined with the information that was attained in part one of this series in regards to the onsite factors we effectively have a blueprint for what is required to hold a top positions for a specific phrase.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So now you have a blueprint, but what do you do with it? The onsite factors covered in onpage optimization need to be duplicated.
The offsite factors (i.e. incoming links) need to be duplicated however what you also must keep in mind is that you are working to beat someone out.

They in turn will work to take back their position, and there may be others working to do that same that just haven’t shown up yet.

Here we follow the 10%-more rule. In regards to onsite factors, all you can do is work with the average keyword densities and make sure your content is well written while maximizing the usage of keyword density and special text to give you the biggest boost possible.

After that the 10% rule comes into effect. Once you know exactly what your main competitors have done in regards to their incoming links, do that but add 10% either in numbers or in value and relevancy.

While this entire process can be very time consuming, the goal here is not to save time, it is to maximize the effectiveness of the SEO performed on your site.

Spending a fraction of the time to produce little or no results is never as desirable as insuring you’re doing it right from the beginning and then taking the time to do what’s needed, thus increasing your odds of success greatly.

In order to help you achieve the type of traffic you need to make your online business a success, we shall look at each of these statements separately and discuss what options are available to enable you to attract the visitors that are essential to your online future. Although there are ways to attract traffic other than through search engine optimization, it is definitely to your benefit if you can secure traffic by means of the free advertising that a high listing in search engines such as Google and Yahoo can provide you with.

There are many ways in which you can make your website as search engine friendly as possible and improve its capacity for traffic generation. Did you notice the mistake I just made there? I mentioned websites in the same sentence as search engine. True search engines look at web pages, not web sites. More on that in a minute. In order to make it easier for me (and you) I am going to apply the name Google whenever I write about ’search engine’, since although Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Ask, etc are important, no one can deny that Google is the biggest search engine.

Not only that, but it was the first true search engine. Yahoo started life off as a web directory, and if your site was not in the Yahoo directory, it would not be listed in a search. Now, however, in addition to being a website directory, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are true web search engines, the same as Google. I will explain the difference later from my website that you can access from the link in my Resource Box.

For the moment, accept the fact that Google and the other true search engines crawl the whole World Wide Web for the web pages that are most relevant to the search term that your customers are using to find the information they are seeking. Did you notice what I just wrote there? ‘Web pages’? Not ‘web sites’ but web pages, as I mentioned earlier. Google and the rest list individual web pages in order of relevance to its interpretation of the words that your potential visitors use to find their information. That is very important to keep in mind.

How do they do that? How do the search engines decide what is relevant and what is not to a character string – that is all that your search term is. That is another story really, but it is connected with what is commonly termed ‘Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)’, a misnomer for a mathematical statistical analysis of the vocabulary on each of your web pages.

I say misnomer, because LSI is not an indexing technique, but an analysis method that uses character strings and known juxtaposition of characters, to determine what you are writing about through the use of contextual relevance of the whole passage of your text to the keyword, or theme, that you have highlighted by means of the search engine optimization techniques available to you. Nobody can make a web page LSI compliant, or ‘use’ LSI on a website.

It is akin to saying that you can use probability equations to write an article on fly fishing. It is a nonsense that even the best known internet gurus believe, unless they are lying to us and I sure that they would not do that. They must therefore be more ignorant than we believed them to be, which explains quite a lot all things considered. Which of the two options would they admit to I wonder.

You no longer need the oft-quoted 1% – 3% keyword density on your web page, but instead more vocabulary and content on your page that makes the topic of that page clear, without any doubt, to software that parses our page for its meaning in additional to human readers who can tell that at a glance. You have to use more vocabulary than just repeat the keyword or Google and the rest of the search engines will not list your page.

The most affordable SEO services will provide you with the small things that you do to your individual web pages to improve your listing position and traffic generation capability. Such services need not be expensive, although the sites you find online that offer them tend to charge high prices since they are targeting large companies rather than individuals with single small websites of a hundred pages or less. One technique that they all mention, however, is the use of meta tags. Many get it wrong!

The only important meta tags are the Title and Description tags. You should also point out to the spiders what your more important vocabulary is by use of H tags, bold text, italics and underlining. Google appreciates that, but while you might be rewarded for doing so, you will not be punished for not doing so. There is a massive difference between breaking the rules and failing to give a helping hand.

Your linking strategy is of critical importance, and you must have a good number of links back to your web page from other relevant web pages. Take note of the two important words I have used there: ‘pages’ and ‘relevant’. I could write 10 pages on Google PageRank without doing it justice, so won’t start now. Just believe me that you get a share of the Google PageRank of a page linking to yours (not of the home page of that site), and since most linking pages are designed only to hold URL links and consequently contain masses of other links on them, then your share is practically zilch.

Do not therefore give a website a link from your home page that reciprocates with one from deep inside the directory structure that provides you with absolutely no benefit. You cannot lose PageRank by providing a link, but why should you give more than you get. Come to an arrangement: you will provide a link from your PR 5 page if the other party reciprocates. Not if their link is from a PR 0 page.

There are many more ways in which you can legally attract search engines to your website and achieve high listings and to generate loads of traffic. There are also many illegal methods of doing so. It is the end result that counts, but before you can even begin to understand what the term ‘black hat’ means, you must first understand what SEO means!

Traffic generation is critical to your success, and if you can find affordable SEO services to help you to achieve that, then you are most of the way there. The effect that good search engine optimization has on the generation of traffic to selected pages within your website cannot be over-estimated and will likely determine your future over the next year.