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Search Engine Optimization
Search engine use is also prolific: 84% of online Americans have used search engines, and, on any given day, 56% of people online are using them.
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
78% of women in the US use the internet for product information before making a purchase and 33% research products and services online before buying offline. The study notes that 69% of the women surveyed go online daily.
Source: Millward Brown Intelliquest
Search Engines are crucial to your websites success! And no one knows more about building Search Engine friendly websites than ElectronMonkey. We have developed local sites that rank #1 in the major search engines for their keywords right now! We specialize in Search Engine Optimization and offer monthly search marketing packages to continually tweak and improve your websites ranking in the search engines!
Contact ElectronMonkey today for your FREE consultation!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural, organic or algorithmic, search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it ranks, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
There are people that will try to sell you the very information listed below. Don't be fooled. There are no "magic" tricks to ranking high in the search engines. Just good, sound, ethical use of modern web principles.
ElectronMonkey will properly use Keywords, Meta Tags, Sitemaps, and Robots.txt Files to optimize your site for Search Engines, including Google®, Yahoo!®, and MSN®. And, ElectronMonkey will avoid ALL practices and techniques that can negatively effect your page rankings on the major Search Engines!
Table of Contents:
Keywords
Today, Keywords are considered the #1 priority of any SEO plan. Your keywords can literally make or break your SEO plan. Keywords are the words and phrases people may use when searching for your products or business on the Internet. Ideally, your keywords should reflect your primary business (ie. "Sporting Goods" for a Sporting Goods Store) and should be used in relevant content throughout the website, including your URL's, page titles, meta tags, etc.
Some keywords are more popular than others, and sites that rank high on a particular keyword may be difficult to overtake. It's usually better to try and use relevant keywords that don't have as much competition to increase your chance of ranking higher. For example, there may be 1,000,000 sites that use the keyword "Sporting Goods," but only 10,000 that use "Hunting Clothes." If hunting clothes is a major product category for you, then it would be a better keyword for you to use, because there are much less web sites to compete with in the search results.
Also, never use keywords that do not pertain to your site, just to try and get a higher ranking. The search engines will pick up on that, and may exclude your site. ElectronMonkey can help you with discovering the best keywords to use for your site!
Content
Content is King! Probably the single most important thing in getting good search engine ranking is quality content. Search engines love content! If your website is mostly made up of images and links then you will never rank high. Now search engines place relevance on the quantity and quality of the actual text on your web pages. Also of importance is how your keywords are being used in the text.
It is next to impossible to trick search engines anymore. Repeating keywords over and over unnecessarily, hiding them (white text on white background), or other "tricks" will get your site excluded immediately. An ethical business will use ethical principles on their website.
Make sure you have good content! This page is a good example of quality content relative to the website. Also the better the content, the more people will link to it, and the higher your site will rank (more on this below).
Meta Tags
At one time meta tags were considered an important factor by search engines. Older search engines used them to determine a site’s content as well as relevance to any given search word. Now search engines use much more advanced techniques to accomplish this, including Keyword Density, Backlinks, and Sitemaps. However, Meta Tags are still sometimes used in search engine result pages by Google®, and other search engines, including MSN® who relies heavily on them. So, although you can't rely soley on Meta Tags anymore, they should still be a part of every website SEO plan.
Properly formed and relevent Meta Tags will be used in your ElectronMonkey site design!
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are a crucial part of any modern SEO plan. Google® relies heavily on sitemaps to index sites, and gives precedence to websites with sitemaps over those without them. SEO Sitemaps are a specific code file (sitemap.txt, or sitemap.xml) placed in the root directory of a website. They guide the search robots to all the URL's on your site, making it easier and faster for them to properly index your site. If you or your webmaster did not create one, then you don't have one!
Currently Google®, Yahoo!®, and MSN® robots are indexing text based sitemaps, when they are available on a website. Google® also uses a more sophisticated XML sitemap submitted by users, but readily accepts the text-based site maps.
All ElectronMonkey website designs will include a sitemap.txt or sitemap.xml file absolutely free!
Robots.txt Files
Robots.txt is a code file placed in the root directory of your web site that tells search robots which pages should NOT be indexed. For example, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you will want to have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk a duplicate content penalty (see below) that will negatively effect your search ranking. Also, if you have sensitive data on your site that you do not want to show up in a search result, you do not want search engines to index these pages as well (not fool-proof). You can also save some traffic bandwidth by excluding images folders, stylesheets and javascript from indexing.
Almost all robots first look for this file when they visit a website. If it's not there then they will index ALL the content on your site. ElectronMonkey includes a robots.txt file that excludes all images, stylesheets, and any other content specified, FREE with any web design!
Backlinks
Backlinks are crucial to SEO success. And unfortunately, partly out of your control. Backlinks are simply links to your site that are located on other sites. The more sites that link back to yours, the higher your search ranking. Sounds simple, but as with all SEO techniques the right way will yield good results and the wrong way may get your site banned from search engines!
The Right Way to Obtain Backlinks:
Content, content, content! We'll say it again - content is King! If your site has relevent and quality content, then good people will naturally link to your site. Other acceptable ways to obtaining quality backlinks are to list your site in appropriate search directories, trade sites, and by posting in popular forums, blogs and article directories and using a text link to your site in the postings (usually in your signature).
The Wrong Way to Obtain Backlinks:
The unacceptable ways include inter-linking (linking to yourself), linking to spam sites or sites that host any kind of illegal content, and linking to link farms (sites of links only with little or no content) etc. Also avoid links pages and link exchange programs on your website. It's tempting to do, but if the number of links leaving your site is higher than the number of sites linking back to your site, the search engines can and will penalyze your site by ranking it low, or worse, by banning it altogether! It sounds selfish, but for maximum SEO, link to as few sites as possible, and have everyone link to you.
Duplicate Content Penalty
Some people think that creating multiple or similar copies of the same page will either increase their chances of getting listed higher in search engines or help them to get multiple listings, due to the presence of more keywords. Nothing could be further from the truth. The search engines will interpet duplicate content as an attempt to trick them into ranking you higher. In order to do well with search engines you need unique and original content on each page. That includes not using content "borrowed" from another site. The search engines will recognize all duplicate and/or plagerized content and penalyze you in the rankings. Remember - content is King!
Sometimes it is necessary to have the same or similar content on several of your pages (print-friendly version for example). In these cases it is important to use your robots.txt file, and sometimes even 301 redirect scripts, to ensure your site does not get penalyzed in the rankings.
ElectronMonkey LLC • 11 Walnut Street
Wellsboro, PA 16901
570•724•0928