Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the practice of making your site as accessible as possible to both search engines and readers. Optimizing your site will make it visible not only to Google, but to every other search engine on the Web. 

Keywords

Scenario: you get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30's, 50's, or heaven forbid, the 300's. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”. 

Not necessarily. If you got ranked for a keyword in Google that you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in Google's search engine increased, at no cost. How? The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. 

Find Your Google Keyword Ranking

For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood. Now there is hope in the form of the following website.

You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant. 

So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to:Search Term Difficulty Checker. This tool tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. 

Estimate Search Traffic

Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets.

Optimize Your Keywords for Google Search

Okay, let’s say everything checks out so far. You rank in the top 1000 in Google's search listings. The term you want to optimize for won’t be that hard to get, and will get you enough traffic per month to justify your efforts. Our fourth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page. GoRank.com does periodic reports on the search engines, and as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants, as well as Google. 

Calculate Keyword Density For Your Website

Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up in Google- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the fifth step at GoRank.com - it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done. 

Google Site Submission - Maybe

Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right? Not necessarily. Let Google find you. HOW Google finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting to Google. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.

What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my members' sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site naturally shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can get spidered within 24 hours if you know where to get your link picked up, and then end up in Google's index in as little as 4 days. 

Google Page Rank

Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight– my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Google Page Rank increased to 5. So even if the Google spider comes to your site on a monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the sixth step: let your page be re-discovered by Google with its great new changes. For bookmarking  site click on A2Z Bookmarks

Here are some articles that can help you get started optimizing your site for searchers and search engines:

• Ten Steps to a Well Optimized Site: Want increased website traffic, higher search engine ranking, and increased customer satisfaction? Read these Ten Steps to a Well-Optimized Site and you'll be well on your way to accomplishing these goals. 
• Top 5 Mistakes in Search Engine Optimization: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of making your site search-friendly both to search engines and searchers. There are five common mistakes that people tend to make when beginning to optimize their sites for search engines.
• Ten Search Engine Optimization Myths - Debunked!: If you're just getting started in search engine optimization for your Web site, you might (unfortunately) have been subjected to a few SEO whoppers. Before you start throwing away your time and money on search engine optimization wild goose chases, read these ten myths of search engine optimization.