Engines and Spiders and Surfers, Oh My!

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(Why search engine optimization is alive, well, and kicking – and as crucial as ever to the success and profitability of your business)By Aimee Cremasco, President, Word Associates“If you build it, th...
(Why search engine optimization is alive, well, and kicking – and as crucial as ever to the success and profitability of your business)By Aimee Cremasco, President, Word Associates“If you build it, they will come…”“If you build it, they will come…”While this is a great line from one of my all time favorite movies, “Field of Dreams,” it is frighteningly also a principle that far too many web site owners inexplicably live by.Let’s face it. In the world of online marketing, “building it” means nothing.
The new mantra must be “If you PROMOTE it, they will come.”So what’s the best way to promote it?Virtually all credible third party statistics would suggest search engine optimization.Consider the following statistics, courtesy of www.GuaranteedTopRankings.com:·In a study released by ActivMedia Research, Search Engine Positioning was ranked the #1 web site promotional method used by eCommerce sites.·Search engines create more awareness about Web sites than all advertising combined including banners, newspapers, TV and radio (IMT Strategies, a division of the Meta Group).The cold, hard truth is that if you’re not successfully optimizing your site (and if it’s not search engine friendly), you’re losing hundreds and thousands of hits from the very people you most want to visit your site – people who demonstrate a serious desire for what you have to offer, by proactively typing keywords related to YOUR business into the engines.So what SEO (search engine optimization) techniques are working and producing results in 2003? While an entire book is probably needed to fully answer this question, here are a few useful components of search engine friendly sites:·Less is more—avoid using frames, java script and database-driven text.·Professional copywriting ·Keyword-rich text (in your tags as well) will make or break your site.Simply put, here’s what search engines do. They have “robots” that scour the Internet and gather up standard keywords, titles and descriptions.
This knowledge is a powerful tool for webmasters, giving them some control over how their pages are ranked, which in turn determines how they appear in the search results. We can't stress enough that content is king! The single most important aspect of your web site is how and where you've placed keywords and phrases — and which keywords you've chosen for your keyword tag.
Think about what your prospects would type into a search box of an engine to find you. Those should be your keywords.
The description tag follows closely on the heels of keywords, as it helps engines determine if the site is relevant to the search. The page title tag is next in line of importance.
It influences where your web site will rank within an engine. Keep it down to a maximum of 60 characters (including spaces), and place it at the top of the HTML code between Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .