Importance of Search Engine Optimization

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

As you set up your business Web site and research how to attract new customers, you will no doubt come across the phrase "search engine optimization." But what, exactly, does it mean?

As the name suggests, it's the process of making your site friendly to different search engines. This allows the search engines to index your site more efficiently, which in turn translates into better ranking for your site in search results. And better search ranking means more traffic to your site.

Before you start, you should understand that top 10 rankings with every single major search engine and directory can be obtained, although very few sites can get there and the effort is often beyond reason. Note: URL ranking results change week-to-week due to competition, so maintaining a top ranking requires constant keywords monitoring and information rework. Search Engine Optimization never rests, much like your competition.

Why is search engine positioning so important?

Our search engine marketing firm can generate a tremendous amount of highly qualified traffic. Many of our clients have reported that our services generated the best return of investment (ROI) they have ever seen, when compared to conventional forms of marketing and advertising such as direct mail, print ads and trade shows. The ever growing increase of high speed internet access, both at the office and at the home, has pushed this even further. There are currently over 200 million internet users within the U.S. alone and over one billion internet users worldwide.

Decide how much you can get benefit? If you have better ranking in Search engines from the chart below:

On Search Engine's Result Pages where people clicks most?

A eye tracking study jointly carried out by the marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it, along with the eye tracking firm Eyetools, on sample Google search results has shown that (perhaps unsurprisingly) your search ranking matters a lot if you're looking for traffic.

See below example for more information:

(60% to 75% Clicks) - 

(25% to 40% Clicks) - 

(07% to 15% Clicks) - 

(03% to 09% Clicks) - 

If your web site conquer the top most results of Search Engine than you are elgible for getting most of the traffic for your optimized keywords

What is Stop Words?

Some search engines don't record extremely common words in order to save space or to speed up searches. These are known as "stop words?."

Stop words are obstacles in Speeding the Searches

Some search engines store every word on a web page but they don't search for certain ones to save time. Consider a search for:

the piano player

The search engine has to make three runs to find matches (again, this is oversimplified).

First it looks for all matches of the, then all matches of piano, then all matches of player.

Chances are, just looking for the last two words is enough to find relevant pages. So to save time, the search engine excludes searching for a select number of small words. It won't "stop" to look for them.

List of Stop words:

a

about

an

are

as

at

be

by

com

de

en

for

from

how

in

is

it

la

of

on

or

that

the

this

10 SEO Mistakes that can hurt your rankings

1- Lack of consistency and maintenance

Our friend Shane often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

2- Concentrating too much on meta tags

A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this.

3- Targetting the wrong keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

4- Lack of keywords in the content

Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

5- Ignoring the Title tag

Leaving the title tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your title tag shows in the search results as your page title.

6- Ignoring URLs

Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

7- JavaScript Menus

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

8- A Flash website without a html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

9- Using only Images for Headings

Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach:

http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text.

10- Backlink spamming

It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks.