Search Engine Optimization FAQWhat is Search Engine Optimization?Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of using a variety of techniques to get your web site to rank higher on the results pages of the search engines. This is called natural results, organic results or free listings. They show up in the middle of the results pages on the search engines and is the most popular place for people to click. What is the best thing I can do to increase my search engine rankings?The best way to increase your rankings is to choose the best keywords that have the fewest competitors. After choosing the right keywords, then get a lot of relevant content on your site. You can do this through information pages, articles, blogs and other types of information. Another way to increase your ranking is to get other sites to link to you. This increases your popularity in the eyes of the search engines. What are META tags?They are the computer code in the background of your web site that tells the search engines what your page is all about. The three most important META tags are the Title tag, Description tag and Keyword tag. You want to make sure your keywords are in all three, though the search engine give more weight to the Title tag and the Description tag. What does it mean to create a theme for my page?The search engines want to give the most relevant results to their visitors, so they want to see a theme to the page. You create themes using the keywords that you've selected. You put them in the META tags, the on-page title, and in the content of the page. This way the search engines will know that you page revolves around the keywords you've selected. What should I look for in a professional search engine optimization?The first thing you want to look at is how well they are doing in the search engines. If they aren't doing well, then it is questionable if they can really help you. Then you need to ask them a bunch of questions about techniques they use to get traffic to the sites of their clients. Here is a good article about this: Spotting a Phony Search Engine Marketing Company within Three Minutes. What is Google PageRank?PageRank is a way that Google ranks your site in regard to several factors, such as the number of pages on your site, the number of incoming links to your site, and how long you've been on the Internet. Google doesn't tell exactly how they give these rankings. It's on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best. Most of the time, if you have a high PageRank, then you will often show up higher on the results page. What is the Alexa Ranking?Alexa is a ranking service that looks at the number of times people visit your site who have installed the Alexa Toolbar. It's generally an arbitrary number but can give you a good idea of how you rank against your competitors. You can visit them at Alexa.com. When you get to the site, input your companies domain name. You can also check on the ranking for your competitors. Do you offer any guarantees on your search engine optimization services? No! we're confident that the initial optimization carried out on your website will get you top ten rankings for your most important keyword phrase. The search engines change their algorithms now and again which means you might drop some places! This means your website would need tweaking to recover your rankings which may take sometime to filter through. It's the search engine optimization specialists job to try keep one step ahead. How does Venturewide differ from other search engine optimization companies? We won't rip you off or make promises we can't keep! We have been the small man starting out in this industry and know what it is like to have a small budget or no budget. Our optimization prices are very realistic; in fact, we challenge you to find a search engine optimization company that could give you a better service for the prices we charge. How long after the optimization has been carried out can I expect to see results? Providing the website has been submitted to the important search engines through paid inclusion, and perhaps Yahoo , about two weeks. If you wait to be picked up by the engines it could be months! Anyhow, it's a slow process and your visitor numbers should still be climbing three months after the initial optimization. Google can take longer even up to 6 months. If my website achieved high rankings after being optimized, would it stay there? It depends! A lot is down to the search engines and their algorithms (what they like to see in a page). You could hold your position for many months without any additional work. There again, you could drop after a month. When this happens the website will need tweaking to regain your rankings. Have all the highly ranked websites got to their top rankings through search engine optimization? We would say yes, mostly! Some sites are branded (household names) which makes it quite easy to get top rankings. Others get there through spamming the search engines in some way. But their success is likely to be very short lived! I've been told I need hundreds of links from other sites to make it to the top of the rankings, is this true? These days the search engines do put a lot of relevance on links that point to your site. A link pointing to your site is like giving your site a good vote. What's more important, is the site that is linking to yours is of good quality, has good PR (page rank), and better still is related to the products or services that you're marketing on your website. Ten links from good quality sites with good PR that are related to yours in some way is better than a hundred links from poor quality unrelated sites. There are other issues involved in linking such as the way your link from another site is presented. What is a Title? The "Title" of a web site is probably the single most important element for natural search engine positioning. The Title is placed within the "head" of the html, is generally 12-15 words long and should be descriptive in nature. What is a keyword? A "keyword" or "keyword Phrase" is the word or words a person types into the search box on a search engine to look up subject matter on the Internet. If you are looking for a flag for your home or office, you might type in "American Flags". The Search Engine screens its database for those web sites it has obtained and looks for the words, "American Flags". Through programming, it then finds and places in order those web sites which it believes to be a match and displays them in order of relevancy. With proper design of a web site, you should have a keyword meta tag area within the head of your html to list the words or "keywords" which best describe your web site. It is important to reflect carefully when choosing your keywords. If you sell boats, but you are only licensed to do so in Maine, then your keywords might best be "boats for sale in Maine" or "Maine Boats", etc. What is a Description? The "Description" of your web site also resides within the "head" of your html and is usually a sentence or two containing approximately 15 words which best describe your web site. What is "body content relevance"? Body content relevance" is the written "non-image" text on the page of the web site which is descriptive in nature and relates to the title, description and keywords. It is not mandatory to have relevant body content, but it most definitely will assist your ranking on the search engines. What is link popularity? Link popularity refers to the number of web pages on the Internet which are recognized by a search engine to have a hyperlink reference to your site, or in other words are "pointing" to your web site as a reference. What does the Submission Process actually so? The SUBMISSION programs send your web site address, "URL" to search engines and links using what is referred to as add-a-URL strings. After receiving the URL, engines use a "spider" to then parses through the HTML code looking for tags that begin with "<a href=". After the entire page has been parsed, a small "Web BOT" travels the links it found, searching for more links using the same procedure until all of the pages at that URL address have been found. When will my Submissions appear on the engines? Every engine and directory is different. In some cases, your submission will appear within a few days. In some cases your submission may be much longer and in some instances, your web site may never get listed by that submission. Because of this, the idea is that the more engines you submit to, the better your visibility will be and if you submit regularly (every month), you have a better chance of getting added to the engines that didn't add you the last time. Many engines and directories put you in a queue. Some will manually add you when they get a chance. Some will wait to check your site out for content. What is the difference between submission and placement and when will my first page paid placement list on the search engines? With search engine submission, we do not guarantee that a search engine will place your web site. With search engine placement, we ask for you to allow ten days for placement on the search engines. You will receive a ranking report at the email address you provided on your order form. What is a search engine and how does it work? On the Internet, a search engine has three parts: 1. A spider (also called a "crawler" or a "bot")
which travels to every page or representative page on every searchable
web site, reads it, then using hypertext links on those pages,
travels throughout the other pages linked by 2. A catalog or Index which is created by programs compiling
the pages read Some components are more visible than others to the average user, but all of them must be working in tandem to create a high performance search tool. The three basic actions that have to be performed for a search engine to be useful are: Gather information, analyze information, and display information. The only major difference between major search engines is how these tasks are performed and how often they are performed. Gathering information Spiders are the programs that search engines use to collect information about web sites on the Internet. These programs traverse the world wide web gathering the content of web sites and store that information for later processing. There are two basic ways that spiders can find your web site. You can tell the search engine about your web site, or let it find your site on its own. Typically search engines will have a place on their web site which allows you to suggest a site to them. After a site has been suggested, the search engines spider will visit that web site to collect information about it. Spiders also follow the links on each web site to find linked sites to visit. This is how a spider will find your site by itself. The more web sites that link to your site, the more likely a spider will find your site without you telling it your sites URL. Usually search engine spiders will revisit your site when you submit your URL again. When the spider finds a link to your site, or after a specified amount of time has passed since its last visit. Depending on the number of web sites that the spider needs to visit and the resources that the spider has at its disposal, it can take days or months for a spider to visit or revisit your web site. 3. Displaying information Search engines take a search request from a user and display a list of web pages that relate to that topic. These returned sites give clues to the algorithm used to analyze the web pages in the search engines index. When a search engine displays the file size of the web page or a percentage next to the web site, it can be used to help figure out how to optimize your web pages better for that search engine. Some search engines return results in the order of relevance; others mix up the results to make sure the web sites returned are from different sites. No matter how a search engine displays the information requested by a user, this result is typically the first impression of your web site. It is important to follow any guidelines that search engines give and do research on how each search engine analyzes web pages so that you not only get a good ranking for your search, but the description of your site is accurate as well. What is an algorithm? The term algorithm (pronounced "AL-go-rith-um") is a
procedure or formula for solving a problem. The word derives from
the name of the Persian mathematician, Al-Khowarizmi (825 AD).
A computer program can be viewed as an elaborate algorithm. In
mathematics and computer science, an algorithm usually means a
small procedure that solves a recurrent problem
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