Beginner Guide to SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a method used by Internet businesses and marketers to improve their rankings on popular search engines by making them more likely to be chosen by the search engine’s particular algorithm.
The primary method used is to make sure the site is liberally laced with keywords that would be used by people using the search engines to find a particular product or service.
Quality marketers who optimize search pages keep two things in mind: the search engine algorithms and the target consumer for the website’s product.
There are, of course, SEO marketers who seek purely to utilize the algorithms to their advantage and get lots of hits, regardless of the quality of the content on the site. These marketers are usually involved in ethically questionable pay-per-hit schemes that have nothing to do with selling a product or providing value to the site’s visitors.
A business that genuinely wants to attract more visitors to their site in order to promote a product wants to draw quality visitors, as opposed to quantity. Therefore, the best method is to optimize the site for the person who’s doing the keyword search: the potential customer.
That means writing quality copy for your website and not loading it up with nonsense pages that are packed with keywords just to get a higher ranking. If you want to create a relationship with a customer and present your business as a professional entity, luring customers to your site with cheesy tricks will have precisely the opposite effect.
Today, most SEO firms suggest that you instead fill your site with click-through pages filled with valuable information, mainly articles on subjects related to your field of interest.
The architecture of your website, the manner in which you’ve designed your page and link structure, needs to be easy to navigate. This means both human visitors and “spiders” (the feelers that search engines put out to find web pages) can maneuver through it with ease.
Not only will this make it easier for search engines to find and register information about your site, it will make it more appealing to potential customers.
Search engine rankings are influenced not just by the number of keywords but by the quality of the links on your site, as well. The thing that the SEO marketers who only concern themselves with number of hits fail to understand is that search engine algorithms are changed regularly as they learn about more and more irrelevant links and factor them lower in their calculations.
You can adjust the way you weight your page with newer tricks to adapt to the changes, but good SEO marketers will tell you that the best way to optimize your site is to develop quality content that will provide quality, relevant links that give visitors good reason to visit your site, and give search engines good reason to continue to rank you higher.
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- Lunch in Edmonton: African. Habesha Ethiopian & Eritrean cuisine
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SEO Calgary Internet Marketing
- New Workshop with Calgary TechnologiesSeptember 30, 2008Calgary Technologies Inc. is launching an exciting new program this fall and we are calling all leaders! This program has been customized for the entrepreneur that wants to stay on top of the latest trends in technology and business. Designed to deliver one day workshops with guaranteed take-away value, this is your opportunity to keep [...]dcree
- Seven Sins of Social Media MarketingAugust 25, 2008I read an article today on Clickz.com that I really liked on Social Media Marketing. The article was a synopsis of a session at SES San Jose, an internet marketing conference. I often speak to businesses here in Calgary and in Edmonton about Social media strategies. I think this article was great, [...]dcree
- Calgary EntrepeneursAugust 15, 2008I just wanted to say thanks to Stuart Crawford and David West for a great Calgary Entrepeneurs Meetup last night. Also for all the others that were there. It was great to meet new faces (especially since I’m fairly new to Calgary). I thought the presentation was good. Being an Internet marketing consultant [...]dcree
- SEO consultant or SEO employee?July 9, 2008One of the good things about the Internet is that there’s a lot of information out there. That’s also one of the bad things. The trouble is, how do you sort out the good information from the bad. On this site, the owner (well regarded in the search engine optimization community) contends that you don’t really [...]dcree
- Can the canned copy: use original content on your websiteJune 25, 2008Recently I ran across a major problem with a client’s website. It was quite by accident really. I discovered that a large portion of the copy on their website was canned copy. Well, no big deal you say? Actually it is. This is known as a duplicate content issue, and is something that can get your [...]dcree
- Lunch in Edmonton: African. Habesha Ethiopian & Eritrean cuisineJune 24, 2008Lunch is one of my favourite meals of the day, and Dave’s too, I think. The other day I spotted an African restaurant on 118th street that I wanted to try out. Looked like a nice place compared to the rest of the street. It’s called Habesha and they have Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine. It was [...]dcree
- Saving time with RSSJune 19, 2008It’s taken me a while to get onto the RSS bandwagon and set myself up with a newsreader. For those of you who don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s that orange logo that you find on sites, typically blogs, and it looks like sound waves. Have a look in the upper right [...]dcree
- Internet marketing, not just SEOJune 18, 2008It’s really only been in the last year or so that the word “search engine optimization,” or SEO, has really come out in the mainstream. Before that, SEO sounded more like a corporate title than a process. If you’ve done a little bit of research, you understand how important search engine optimization can be. You’ve probably [...]dcree
- You have 100 wordsMay 29, 2008Keeping things short and sweet seems to be the skill everyone is lauding these days. I heard about a venture capital meeting going on this morning in Edmonton and decided to check it out. Rick Segal, the guy running the meeting, keeping it short and sweet when you’re pitching him : you have 100 words. Everyone [...]dcree
- Canadian Association of Journalists CAJ media conferenceMay 26, 2008I attended the Canadian Association of Journalists conference here in Edmonton over the weekend. I am glad I did. I was able to meet a good number of people who work in media in Edmonton and across Canada, as well as people working in media-related organizations. It was my first time attending a CAJ conference, which [...]dcree