Search Engine Optimization Guide

Search Engine Optimization or SEO: The fine art of making ones web site show up at the top of the list without paying for it.

Search engine optimization is an interesting world indeed with Google's constantly changing algorithms. Since seventy five percent of searches are done through Google, this is the search engine we are most concerned with. There are many factors Google uses to determine how to index a web site. Many SEO "experts" use special search engine optimization software to optimize websites but there have been problems with some seo software (some highly regarded software even banned by Google). While it's understandable to use seo tools to help automate the process of submitting large numbers of web sites to large numbers of search engines and directories, we believe the best seo tool available on the market today is the human brain. First we do a thorough keyword analysis. Then we see how well the competition's web sites are optimized for our selected keywords. We look at the top listed sites for our keywords and determine what they have in common and why Google "likes them". Then we optimize our sites accordingly. We believe this to be the most common sense approach to determining the current Google Friendliness Factors or GFFs (my own term) and  getting web sites to list well in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

More on Keywords

Keywords can be either single words or phrases that are specific to a particular subject. For instance, "widgets" would be a keyword as would "blue widgets" or "blue widgets for sale". So if your company was in the business if selling blue widgets then the last one would likely be a good keyword for you. However, there are probably other companies, maybe 50,000 or so, that also sell blue widgets and would like their website to appear first. This is where keyword analysis comes in. Fortunately for those of us who are interested, there are tools available to query the databases of search engines and see exactly how many people are searching for a particular keyword and how many websites are optimized for those keywords. A free tool that will give a fair idea of what's what is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

In a nutshell: Content is King! Google and other search engines want to provide the most relevant content possible to the person searching for it. A few years ago you could do well by stuffing your meta tags with keywords (relevant or not). You still can with some search engines but Google now ignores meta tags and instead crawls web pages,  pulling content from them and indexing them according to their relevance to a particular subject. The more relevant, authoritative, and fresh the content, the better Google indexes the page and therefore the higher the page appears in the SERPS

Pagerank is an important term but does not mean the the same thing as how well you rank in the SERPS. Pagerank (Googlejuice) is basically how important Google considers your site to be to the subject you claim to be talking about. It determines this importance by the number of inbound links from other quality sites of similar subject matter. A good in depth explanation of pagerank can be found at http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html.

More on this later... mike