Search Engine Optimization

One of the biggest marketing and public relations challenges new companies often face is getting their site ranked on Google searches. Google basically owns the internet, and when it comes to search, approx. 50% of everybody who searches online is using Google. The other 50% are using one of the myriad of other providers (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc.).

So if you start a new business and you want to get your website up at the top of the search engine results, what do you do? Well, a good place to start is by getting yourself familiar with the way Google's algorithm decides what pages are relevant and what pages are irrelevant or just spam. Google uses what's called "Page Rank" to assign a number between 1 and 10 to every website Google's robots will crawl. It is that Page Rank that determines where your site lands on a Google search. The higher your website's Page Rank, the higher your site is listed on Google.

While there are many factors that determine a particular site's page rank, the top three in order of importance are these:

1. The number of other pages that link to your page - or "back links."
2. How long the web page has existed.
3. Frequency and location of keywords (the search terms) on the web page itself.
   

So now that you know what determines the Page Rank, how do you get "back links" for your site? The first thing I would suggest is to order the book "Search Engine Optimization - An Hour a Day" which will give you a step-by-step explanation of SEO and how you can begin right now to optimize your site so it shows up in the search results. Once you've familiarized yourself with SEO through reading the book, you can then go to that same website and download some SEO campaign planning templates. Use these templates to organize the steps you will need to take to optimize your website for search engines.

One thing you'll notice while getting into this process is that you need to know and understand well a host of new terms. Some of these include:

• Anchor text - the text or words in the web address itself. If the anchor text of your website is not similar to the search keywords, you'll have a much more difficult time ranking your site. For example, if I own a company that sells vacuums but my website is called www.JakesSuctionWarehouse.com, I'm going to have a harder time ranking because when someone searches for vacuums, Google's index will skip right over my URL and instead favor listing sites that have the keyword "vacuum" in the anchor text itself.
• Meta tags - the html tags embedded in web pages which only search engines can see. These tags provide search engines with the description text below links in a search listing.
  
• Black hat - an adjective phrase used to describe deceptive SEO tactics that eventually lead to being delisted from a search engine database. For more information, see this Wikipedia article.

While there are so many more things involved in proper search engine optimization, I hope this gives you a nice starting point to help your site become "king of the hill" search results wise.