Search Engine Optimization is most important, cost-effective method to bring targeted traffic.

According to estimates, site owners will spend $3.3 billion in 2005 on paid search listings, compared to just $238.5 million on site optimization to get more and better rankings in organic search engines. This is a reason why search engines are still so bad at listing big companies at top. Fortunately for little guys like us who knows how.

Our aim is to share this knowledge to make you consistently beat big players.

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization.

Initially, search engine ranking was based entirely on the words and HTML found on webpage. Optimization was simple: the better you could divine the search engine's secret algorithm as to keyword density in various parts of the webpage, the higher rankings you could achieve. You could repeat a keyword dozens of times on your webpage and magically it would shoot to the top of the rankings.

But in September 1998, Google began introducing another factor that affected ranking - the quantity, quality, and context of incoming links to your website. Today, all the major search engines measure link popularity and use it to improve the accuracy of their results.

Two factors affects your webpage ranking:

1. Page content - URL name, title, meta tags, body text, alt tags, headings and hyperlinks.
2. The structure of links - quantity, quality, and context of your site links.

Content Optimization for Better Ranking in Search Engine Results Page.

All the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) use different and ever-changing algorithms, but the rule is that good content will get more visitors. Always. Concentrate on building true value first. It's the hardest but the most important principle in search engine optimization.

Make each page on your site about a specific keyword. Focus the content of each page. Divide long, general pages into several specific, one-topic webpages, a minimum of 250 to 500 words. Make proper keyword selection when writing - you can double your site traffic without doubling your efforts.

Use selected keywords in title, once in description tag, once in a heading, once in bold, once on top of the page, and keep the keyword frequency between 5 and 20% (do not worry about exact values). Meta keywords and description tags do not directly affect your search engine ranking, as they used to be a few years ago. But search engines read description tag and snippets returned by the search engine is usually a combination of the meta description tag and extracts from the text on the page.

Design Rules for Search Engine Optimization.

URL names: do not use dynamic (with a question mark in them) URLs. If your site generated from database applications or dynamically produced by the content management programs, employ "URL rewriting" to simplify the URL for the search engine spider. Read how keywords in URL influence your rank before naming your URLs.

Your domain name should not contain your top keywords. You need google.com and not i-have-keywords-in-my-domain-hahaha.com. Keyword domains are out - branding and name recognition are in - big time in.

Your website need a dedicated IP address, not a virtual hosting. The reason is that, if you share an IP with other websites, your site may be penalized for something one of the other sites on your IP address is doing.

Lastly, do not use frames, java, javascript or flash.

Link Building Over Content Optimization. How to Increase Search Engine Ranking.

Linking is another and sometimes more significant component to a search engine optimization. While content determines what a site is about, links determines how useful your site is on that topic. Furthermore, it is possible to be listed in search engine results page for a keyword that does not exist on that page, thanks only to the link popularity of incoming links.

An average page contains incoming links from a pages you do not own, ougoing links to a pages you do not own and internal links to another pages you own.

Internal links are absolutely under your control to distribute your PageRank value across your website. You do not need an "all star" page that out performs the rest of your website. You want 50 pages that produce 1 referral each a day and do not want 1 page that produces 50 referrals a day.

Outgoing links: from every page, link to some high ranking sites under your web niche. Use your keywords in the link text.

Incoming links from other websites to your will probably not send a lot of new traffic your way. It depends on the link itself. Only incoming links brings PageRank and link popularity to your pages. Together with your exellent keyword-rich content link building will get you everything in search engine optimization.

References

1. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Google introduction by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
2. SearchEngineWatch - latest facts, news and tips about Search Engines.
3. Successful Site in 12 months with Google Alone by Brett Tabke. Excellent article describing how self-started site should be in the 10-15k page views per day range in 1 year time.
4. WebmasterWorld - News and Discussion for the Web Professionals.
5. SEO Chat - Search Engine Optimization Forums.
6. Apache HTTP Server URL Rewriting Guide.
7. Google bomb - how anchor text may influence the SE ranking. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
8. Search Engines Labs some practical tests to obtain empircal evidence of search engine ranking algorithms.