Search Engine Traffic This is the best source of long-term free traffic, but requires a lot of time and effort and can take many months for your pages to get ranked before you get any results. Visitors enter their searches into search engines like Google or Yahoo and the sites ranked highest are displayed at the top of the list. If a visitor clicks on the search engines link to your site, you have a visitor! How Does SEO Work? All search engines have a set of rules (algorithms) that they use to judge the importance (rank) of a web page for a specific word or phrase (keyword).The search engines use software robots called spiders that continually crawl the web and report back to the search engines. Once your site has been crawled the search engine will place it in its index of web sites and at a later stage will rank the page according to their rules. How to get your pages spidered and indexed quickly is more of an art than a science. Some search engines provide a facility that you can use to submit your site details to them. However, this method is not very effective. An effective way to get spidered is to get a highly ranked (authority) website to place a link back to your site. When the spiders crawl the authority site and find your link, they think your site must also be important and follow the link to crawl your site (this is a very simplistic explanation of a very complex subject). Getting a high ranking is obviously very desirable and potentially worth a lot of money to the site owner. To prevent anyone from working out a way to cheat the search engines, they frequently change their rules, which are a closely guarded secret. Most internet marketers have their own pet theories about SEO (search engine optimisation) and there is continual debate and speculation about what works and what doesnt. If you really want to get deeply involved in SEO (I suggest you dont waste your valuable time) there are many free articles available and you can visit some of the many discussion groups (forums) on SEO. Factors Influencing SEO Although the rules are not known, there are a number of factors that are generally accepted to be relevant to good rankings. These factors fall into two categories: * On-Page factors such as keyword density * Off-Page factors such as incoming links A good idea is to get some help in the form of step by step instructions and coaching videos designed specifically for newbies. |
