STEP BY STEP SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION PAGE 10 TO 12

THIS IS STEP BY STEP SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION PAGE 10 TO 12            CHAPTER 1

At the beginning of the Yahoo! integration, I left Microsoft to start my own search engine agency. At Sovo Media, my primary focus has been working with business owners to meet their online goals, and as such, I’ve been exposed to hundreds of opportunities to drive increased search engine rankings. While the only guarantees in life are death and taxes, and it is true that even the best SEO professionals aren’t successful 100 percent of the time, I will say that I have had a consistent track record of success. In this book, I’ll reveal the exact process, techniques, and tools I use to achieve these types of results.

My intent with this book is to give you the tools and resources you need to apply these same techniques and to experience similar success. What can you expect by increasing your search engine rankings? Success on the search engines typically leads to increased web traffic and visibility, a spike in interested visitors to your website, and the resulting benefit of more awareness, phone calls, and online sales through your web presence.

Before we get started, I would like to introduce a quick history lesson. In 1996, two Stanford classmates had a vision to organize all of the information found on the web in a relevant and manageable way. To say that this was a challenging task is an understatement. Billions of web pages with information on every imaginable topic can be found on the Internet today. And the place most people now visit when searching for information? Google—the brainchild of those two Stanford classmates.

Throughout this book, I’ll discuss the strategies I use to get websites ranked on search engines like Google for the search terms most relevant for their products and services. Within this book, I primarily refer to strategies geared toward positively impacting Google searches, since Google currently accounts for around 70 percent of all search engine traffic. Plus, when you optimize for Google, you will typically experience increases on the rest of the search engines as well.

As a reference, here is a current breakdown of search engine traffic by individual search engine:

Search Engine Market Share Report

Source: comScore - a global leader in measuring the digital world and marketing intelligence.

While I often refer to Google, please note that these tactics will typically assist with increased exposure across all of the search engines. However, it’s much easier to focus your attention specifically on Google given the search market share it currently enjoys.

My goal with this book isn’t to help you beat the system. In fact, it’s the opposite. I want to help you figure out the best way to make the search engines understand what your site is about and why they should give you priority for the search terms you deem important. By working with the search engines, you can drive significantly more traffic to your website and create a better experience for the searcher as well. It’s a win-win situation: the search engines provide better information to their users, while you get more traffic to your site. And when everybody wins, it’s a good day!

Search engine optimization has acquired a negative perception over the years. Some people see SEO as trying to trick and manipulate the search engines into giving their sites preferential treatment. I’ll let you in on a secret. The search engines want you to do optimization—because it makes their searches better. A search engine’s business is built on offering searchers relevant information. When you make your information more relevant to searchers, the search engines benefit and, more importantly, so do you.

Let’s begin with why search engines matter. As mentioned earlier, over 90 percent of the adult population uses search engines to find information. It seems that Internet users have become preconditioned to go to a search engine first. Many have set a search engine as their default home page. In fact, many Internet users will go to a search engine to find a site even when they already know the name of the site they’re trying to locate!

Take a look at this recent data from the Pew Research Center:

Source: The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, April 26 – May 22, 2011 tracking survey.

As you can see, getting ranked on search engines has become something of a necessity. By getting ranked, I’m referring to the process of having your website show up on the search engines for search terms relevant to your site.

Unfortunately, how to get ranked has proven extremely confusing for many website owners. But it doesn’t have to be some unknown black hole. Careful consideration goes into Google’s search engine placement, and discovering how those decisions are made can make all the difference.

Search engines are continuously crawling the web while seeking out new pages and content. They aren’t overly sophisticated, as they can read text and links but not much else. When you conduct a search, the results are displayed almost magically, but a lot is happening behind the scenes. In this book, I’ll uncover these mysteries so that anyone who wants to be found on Google will have an opportunity to do so.

When I started my agency, I did extensive research, went to conferences, made friends with other search engine marketing firms, and spent a tremendous amount of time and money to truly understand how and what it means to rank highly on the search engines.

What I share in this book isn’t some random theory about why search engines give preference to some websites over others. It isn’t meant to be a general outline of what to look out for. It was born out of real-world results and is designed to be a concise, easy-to-implement process that, if followed diligently, should help you garner better results on the search engines. Again, as a word of caution, nothing is ever guaranteed in the world of search engine optimization, as any SEO professional can attest. That being said, you really have nothing to lose by implementing the strategies outlined in this book.

THIS WAS THE 1ST CHAPTER OF STEP BY STEP SEO

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