Get Started With These Seo Marketing Tips

There are hundreds of thousands of jobless individuals who want to get out of their current situation but are unable to do so.

Before they entered the world of unemployment, they were not worrying about their expenditures. They expected monthly salaries that they can use to pay for their expenditures.

Aside from their regular monthly salaries, they are also entitled to several benefits such as health care, group accident insurance, financial incentives, holiday bonuses, and others. Thus, their life during their employment years is just like living in a world of security in terms of convenient living.

But the world that they are now into is different compared as to when they are still employed. After losing their respective jobs (due to streamlining of their employee ranks or the company is experiencing financial difficulties), they have been stripped of their monthly salaries and additional benefits.

Their basic needs are just provided given the availability of sufficient funds. Medical and educational necessities of their children are now beyond their reach simply because they cannot afford it. They lose all of their credit cards because they have no money to pay for its interest.

In other words, they are now at the helm of poverty brought by unemployment.

Despite of their current situation, most of them are determined to get out of such situation. All available job vacancies posted through local classified ads or Internet are sorted out, hoping for any possibility of getting employed from any of these vacancies.

However, you cannot deny the fact that getting employed is nearly impossible to achieve. With thousands of applicants fighting for a single job vacancy, what is the probability that you will be hired? That is nearly impossible, so to speak.

What these jobless individuals do not realize is that there is still an alternative wherein they can get out from their unemployed status. They can earn enough or more for their families, and even get beyond the earnings of a corporate executive.

That is nearly impossible, you will say. But with seo marketing, it is always a possibility.

If you are quite familiar with Internet marketing, you will be able to read and hear success stories about individuals who have been denied of getting employed, yet with the knowledge of Internet marketing together with their determination to get out of their unemployed status, they have succeeded and now earning more for themselves and for their families. For these successful online entrepreneurs, Internet marketing is a blessing for them.

Despite of the huge opportunity that Internet marketing provides to individuals who are courageous enough to take the risk, there are still individuals who fail to earn through their online business. It is because of their lack of necessary knowledge about Internet marketing attributes, particularly about the importance of search engine rankings.

What is search engine ranking? How important it is to the success of an Internet marketer's career?

Every time online shoppers look for any product or service that they need or Internet users search for any useful information that can be utilized for any purposes, they tend to use search engines. If you are familiar with Google, Yahoo, or MSN, these are just some examples of search engines. The results displayed on search engine inquiries that are made is important to online shoppers and Internet users in finding any information, product, or services that they need.

Since Internet marketing is an online-based business opportunity, search engine ranking is one of the attributes that you need to consider. You need to build a clientele base that will patronize the products and services that you are offering for sale on the Internet. Such clientele base will come from the majority of online shoppers and Internet users over the Web, thus you need to attract them to visit your site and purchase your products or services. This is what you called the conversion of web traffic into loyal clientele base.

You will be able to attract traffic to your site through high search engine rankings. Your Internet marketing website must be on the top pages of every related search engine result that will be made out of every related inquiry. Remember that Internet users prefer the websites that are "highlighted" or placed on top search engine result pages. If your site appears on top pages of any search engine (not just one but several search engines), you will be able to attract more traffic to your website and convert them into loyal and long-term clients.

There are other things to consider when relating Internet marketing to search engine. However, you must remember one of the basics of Internet marketing-search engine provides you the opportunity to succeed in your online career.

In this article we will discuss how search engines work and how to use them to your advantage.

It doesn't matter how great your website, if no one sees it, you're not going to make a penny. You can spend days producing the perfect design, weeks tweaking the copy, and months writing the code and uploading the pages, but if no one knows where you are, how are they going to know they should buy from you?

When I first started selling on the Web, the first major problem I ran into was bringing customers to my door. I put banner ads on other sites, organized reciprocal links and joined Web rings.

Those methods all worked to some extent, but what really did it for me, what turned my business from a small earner into a major money-grabber, was figuring out how to use search engines.

Sure, I'd submitted my sites to the major search engines as soon as I'd finished building them, but I didn't really pay them much attention. After all, I figured search engines are just for people who are looking for information; they're not really good for commercial sites.

Boy, was I wrong!

One day, I sat down and checked out which sites were popping up first in the categories that suited my businesses. I found that all the top-ranked sites were my biggest competitors. And when I say biggest, I mean these guys were in a whole other league.

They had incomes that were ten or twenty times the size of mine-no wonder they had top billing at Yahoo! and Google! And then it clicked. Search engines don't list sites by size, they list them by relevance. These sites weren't listed first because they were big; they were big because they were listed first!

That was when I began to 'optimize' my pages and think about meta-tags and keywords. As my sites rose through the listings, my traffic went through the roof. And not just any old traffic!

The people that came to my sites from search engines hadn't just clicked on a banner by accident or followed a link from curiosity, they'd actually been looking for a site like mine. My sales ratio went up like a rocket. I'd created my own big break.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss all proven strategies of Search Engine Optimization. We would discus how to optimize your site, submit your pages and pick up the targeted traffic you need to make cash. This chapter is probably the most important chapter in the whole book. It's crucial that you read it carefully.

Let's start with search engines.

How Search Engines work

Internet search engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various search engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

* They search the Internet -- or select pieces of the Internet -- based on important words.

* They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.

* They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Spidering

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites.

When a spider is building its lists, the process is called Web crawling.

In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages.

The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.

Indexing

Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages, the search engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key components involved in making the gathered data accessible to users:

* The information stored with the data

* The method by which the information is indexed

In the simplest case, a search engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word.

In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

To make for more useful results, most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page.

Each commercial search engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders.

An index has a single purpose: It allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word.

The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's effectiveness.

The search engine software or program is the final part. When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the search engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.

Is Your website search engine friendly? If you have any doubts, it may be time to take a look and make your own "big break".

Finding your website is one thing, but knowing what to do once you get there is quite another.

In this section we will discuss the importance of website navigation and how it can make or break your site.

The aim of a web site's navigation is simply to allow users to get to the content they require. For sites that have a large number of sections and web pages (and information sites can be one of these) the navigation plan has to be properly researched and designed.

You have to consider different types of visitors and simulate the most common steps they would take to find what they want on your site and the navigation plan has to optimize this movement.

For example the steps required from searching a catalog of items, selecting from the catalog, adding them to a shopping cart, proceeding to check out, to entering the payment particulars is a specific sequence that should be facilitated by the navigation system.

If the sequence is haphazard, it could lead to frustration or the user may miss an important step and you would have an aborted sale.

To find their way about, users need to know two things:

* Where they are now
* How to go elsewhere

Navigation does not exist in isolation; good site organization is a prerequisite for a coherent navigation system.

Objectives of a Navigation System

Navigation can be broken into two primary types, Location Indicators and Navigation Controls

Location Indicators

Location indicators let users know where they are in the site at the moment. It needs to be borne in mind that users coming from outside your site can enter at any page, not necessarily on a 'main' page. They need to be able to orientate themselves.

Equally it is important that users navigating around your site have a clear idea of where they are both in absolute terms and in relation to other content.

Location information should appear on every page of the site, in the same place and in the same style. Location indicators should tell the user precisely where they are and this should be clear even to a user who has entered the site at an internal page.

The location indicator should be identifiable for what it is and make sense in the context of other navigation.

In simple sites a page banner - text or graphic - naming the page will be sufficient. For this to work the page name should also appear in the main navigation so that it is relevant within the overall structure of the site.

Color can be used. For example a different color background, contrast color or sidebar in each part of the site. To be really effective the color change should be reflected in the navigation.

Using 'breadcrumbs' on every page is a good idea. Breadcrumbs show you a series of hierarchical links that you have used to go from page to page within a section. Using breadcrumbs is like leaving a trail of the path you have followed. The breadcrumbs appear at the top of the content section, just below the main navigation template.

Each element in the breadcrumb is a link to that section or subsection. This helps in avoiding a series of back buttons allowing the user to directly go back to the main section page or another sub section. More importantly, it always shows the context of the page that is being viewed and how it belongs to a section or sub-section.

Navigation Controls

Navigation controls are the main navigation links; they allow users to move around the site. Whether they comprise images or text they should be predictably located in the same place, and with the same appearance, on each page.

These have several purposes

* To allow users to move about within the site
* To tell users what information is available at the link
* To work with location indicators to orientate users

A good navigation control:

* Is clear: it looks like navigation
* Leads to obvious content - users have a good idea what they will find if they click
* Is consistent with other navigation controls
* Is predictable in its style and location on the page

There is no mystery to usability. It simply involves creating a site, which is accessible to the majority of people, is easy to use and get around and delivers on its promises. You can have a site that meets the most important standards of usability by planning it well and always keeping the end user in mind. Remember that web sites should not be designed for their owners - they should be designed for their users.

Problems with usability could be said to stem from just two sources: the site itself and the user. In fact the site is always at fault; if a user, however experienced or inexperienced, has problems navigating, getting information or understanding the site.

While websites have become far more complex, web users have become less rather than more experienced as more and more people go online. It is a mistake to think that the majority of users will be web or even computer savvy and will understand subtle clues about content. Most will not.

So take these words of advice and review/plan your navigation links accordingly. Just remember - if the customer gets lost, so will your sale.

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