Overview of SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Why is SEO Important?

Search engines are the most important way to find websites in the internet. Generally, a listing in a search engine is free. So, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is usually the first step to take when marketing a website. Good search engine optimization can bring you plenty of visitors every day in the hundreds and even thousands, and at no cost. It is not easy to get a top listing and could take time in months of tweaking but it is certainly worth it.

We will outline some tips and tricks I have used before to get top rankings within the search engines. It does not happen overnight and it does take time and great effort, but if you follow these clear guides you will definitely increase the odds of getting a top ranking with the  search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Importance of Links

SEO books will teach  about the importance of titles, meta tags, text concentration, etc. This is important, but there's nothing more important than links.

Google which is the most popular search engine looks mainly at the number and quality of links from other sites to it. If your website has no inbound links, it is unlikely that you will even show up in Google's listings. The other search engines like Yahoo and MSN are also looking at links; most do to some extent, but Google places the largest weight on it.

Search Engine Google uses an algorithm called "PageRank" (PR) to determine how popular a site is.

Every webpage gets a number from 0 to 10. 0 means that the page is not currently ranked, possibly banned or the page may not exist, and 10 is hugely popular (there are about 25 pages on the entire internet with a 10).

• The scale is logarithmic. What this means is that twice as many links will not give you twice the PageRank. So moving from one number to the next could take five or ten times as many links. Thus it is difficult to get a high PageRank.
  
  
• Google doesn't just look at how many links are pointing to your pages, it also looks at the PR of the pages linking to you. So a link from a PR9 site is worth a lot more than a link from a PR3 site. Google considers how many other links are on the page that links to you.
  
  
• The anchor text of a link matters. Google considers what text is used to link to your site. If you haven't named your site yet, choose one that has related keywords in it.

To see what a site's PageRank is look at the Google Toolbar which you can download.