Why SEO FAQ's
There are many top questions that people encounter in the Internet frontier of SEO; we have assembled a few of the most common questions to increase your knowledge of SEO.
What is SEO? SEO is short for search engine optimization. An expert in the understanding for the complicated search engine analytics, page design, layout, keyword placement coupled with site relevance can optimize your lead in pages so they are friendlier, compliant, and strengthen your positioning when the search engines visit.
SmartPhones SEO? Yes by year end there will be twice as many people on smartphones than on personal computers. Smartphone users are on line longer, more often, 59% click through and call, 61% will stop in by using an interactive map.
You must have a site designed to flow fast and click through on smartphones.
We are also Smartphone Traffic.com You need first page of smartphone listing to insure your business or service is found.
Why does someone need SEO? There are 26 plus million web pages, many will be done by top designers charging ten's of thousands of dollars for the latest technological enhancements and displays. Yet the site owner ends up with no visits. SEO will insure that you are found by the search engines and working with the highest efficiency to your targeted market. Advertising agencies spend millions on focus groups and research looking to find new ways to market to buyers at the "buying moment". When someone types your search into a search engine, and you are found, you have seized that "buying" moment with your buyer. SEO targets you to your audience, without the clutter of being on page 5 section D of your newspaper, running a radio ad to people who have no intention of buying from you today, or the exorbitant expense of television.
What happens on the search engines? Normally several times a month the search engines sweep the Internet with a large installation of computers. Finding sites through links, words, connectivity, and registrations. They then use their "top secret" ever-changing mathematical equation to see which sites best match which keywords, content, and market. Once the sweep is finished, the newer index is loaded providing fresher results for the people searching the Internet.
The web changes daily, the mathematical equation is ever changing, and new sites come to life.
This is one reason you must maintain a relationship with someone doing your SEO work. What worked last month, may or may not work this week.
How can an investment in SEO help my business? In the past, you opened your business, got a phone, and then prayed you could stay in business with newspaper ads or flyers until the new phone book came out. You then probably spent hundreds per month for a small section ad in the phone book. Today, the new Generation X or better known as Gen X and Gen Y savvy computer users have little use or experience with a phone book. Even the fast growing senior citizen age group in 2005 there were 33.2 million Boomers online in the US between the ages of 50 and 64. Boomers have $1 trillion in spending power according to emarketing. As before, you can buy a phone book ad, radio spot, or television ad believing someone will see or hear your ad the day they are looking for you, or you can reach the new majority of your customers at the "buying" moment.
Why do I need a presence on the Internet for 2 years? Referring back to earlier comments, search engines index at intervals, content on the web pages is constantly alternating, and your competition is modifying what they do. We believe SEO is a long term relationship to keep your placement on the Internet more than just a glimmer one time based on some slight of hand. Internet presence is a must these days, with 2010 showing a 10 to 20 fold increase in searchers, you will need to be found to reach any market in our computer age. The cost of sending your contact information to 115 million America households is 26 for a small post card and 41 cents for a large post card. When you calculate that cost, SEO is a cheap investment over a few years to reach the generations at work, at home, or now on the road.
What is the future of SEO? In 2006 there were 1 billion Internet users, by 2010 that number should grow to 1.8 billion. Internet searches are growing from 400 billion in 2006 to 4 trillion in 2010. With the sheer size and increase in numbers of business and numbers of users on the Internet, the Internet is predicting a 10-fold demand on traffic in the next 4 years. With 28 million US small businesses the SEO future is bright, in fact if you are not setting aside SEO dollars in your advertising and marketing budgets you can quickly join the ranks of the 10% of small business that fail each year.
What happens if I hire an unethical SEO company? An unethical SEO company can hurt your ranking or even get it black listed by the search engines.
Here are a few of the common slight of hands to give you quick results before you are de-listed.
- Spamming the title or Meta tags with keywords.
- Page cloaking websites shows keyword rich pages to a robot but displays pages that are not useful or invisible the Internet viewer.
- Keyword forcing/stuffing: using the same words over and over in the content.
Link buying pages or link farms are sites that have numerous links and are used to make just make a profit. (Affiliate advertising programs.) - Page copying. Taking the content from one site to paste into your coding on your site to help your rankings.
- Duplicate content should be avoided it may stop your website from being indexed.
- Always verify that you are working with a company that practices ethical, long term, natural (organic) techniques to maximize your Internet presence.
Again, know whom you are dealing with. SEO is too important to trust someone just out for a quick dollar and you end up deleted from the search engines.
What if I manually submit my sites to all the search engines? Manual submission works for only a few of the smaller search engines. Placing a manual submission of your site will force the index to rank you according to the submittal criteria and not always in the ranking you should be in with your ever-changing content or as your site is further focused or developed. 90% of search engines obtain their index or sweep from GoogleÔ. It is not a secret that GoogleÔ bots give their ranking based on Internet searches and not manual listings.
Why do search engines charge for placement? Not all search engines do, but some of the larger ones charge for first listings, space on top, and some for a simple text listing of your site. That is one way they earn revenue. The problem with paid placement it is very expensive for one or two keywords based on a geographical location. Often your business needs more than two words to describe it or your reach is outside of one town.
Now that I have the extra traffic, why aren't my sales increasing? The storeowner often asks the same question even though they have a prime location in the mall. I have the traffic, everyone loves my stuff, but my shelves are still full??? Internet is like all of the brick and mortar business over the years in the USA. You have to have a product, pricing, presentation, service, and build relationships with your customers. The magic is the opportunity each day to have Internet users at your Internet door step during the buying moment. It will always be up to your savoir fairein pricing, sales, & marketing to close the deal.
How long will this SEO work take? The marketing research, including competitor surveys, placement research, and production of your optimization starts once the work order is approved. It is not an instant process, and not something completed with an apportionment of software, real people with real skills and vast Internet experience will first spend their resources to measure the amount of SEO that needs to be done. One tip to remember, it is easier to launch a new site the right way, than to go back and correct the mistakes that have plagued a site.
What happens if I don't get ranked in 30 days? First, you will be ranked within 30 days of your site being active, but you may not yet be ranking at the optimal position we wish to obtain. Time ranges and results can vary based on the Internet sweeps. Often the search engines sweep the sites, upload and test the results for a few days, pull down the sweep, rework it and reload it back up.
What does that mean to you? We have seen sites that did not show in the first 40 pages of results, move to the top, and then during the rework of the sweep, drop off for a few days, only to move back to top ranking by the next week.
If you ever see this, don't panic, it is just part of the natural process to insure long term results.
How often do you monitor my ranking?New sites after loading are monitored several times a week for the first 30 days, once indexed; they are often modified and then monitored for impact of the changes. Once placement is obtained in the first 90 days, we will be monitoring your sites monthly for proper indexing.
Currently I have paid for clicks, why do I need SEO work done? We obviously believe in the power of the search engines and even buying keywords like Google's AdSenseÔ. Many customers spend $2 or $3 per click for valued keywords. 500 click throughs and you have spent $1,000 to capture those buying moment customers. But what about the traffic looking for you after you have spent your monthly budget? Or what about all the traffic that does not click on the paid ads? Or your buyer is not using the search engine site where you placed your advertising dollars? We are working your site optimization to over 90% of the Internet search engines and complimenting your pay for click advertising campaigns to increase your traffic, month in and month out.
Want to learn more? Here is a Glossary of terms:
Term |
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AdWords |
| See Sponsored Links. |
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algorithm |
| A complex mathematical formula used by search engines to assess the relevance and importance of websites and rank them accordingly in their search results. These algorithms are kept tightly under wraps as they are the key to the objectivity of search engines (i.e. the algorithm ensures relevant results, and relevant results bring more users, which in turn brings more advertising revenue). |
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article PR |
| The submitting of free reprint articles to many article submission sites and article distribution lists in order to increase your website's search engine ranking and Google PageRank. (In this sense, the "PR" stands for PageRank.) Like traditional public relations, article PR also conveys a sense of authority because your articles are widely published. And because you're proving your expertise and freely dispensing knowledge, your readers will trust you and will be more likely to remain loyal to you. (In this sense, the "PR" stands for Public Relations.) |
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article submission sites |
| Websites which act as repositories of free reprint articles. They are sites where authors can submit their articles free of charge, and where webmasters can find articles to use on their websites free of charge. Article submission sites generate revenue by selling advertising space on their websites. See also article PR. |
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backlink |
| A text link to your website from another website. See also link. |
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copy |
| The words used on your website. |
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copywriter |
| A professional writer who specializes in the writing of advertising copy (compelling, engaging words promoting a particular product or service). See also SEO copywriter and web copywriter. |
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crawl |
| Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out 'spiders' or 'robots'. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links. To a spider, a text link is like a door. |
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domain name |
| The virtual address of your website (normally in the form www.yourbusinessname.com). This is what people will type when they want to visit your site. It is also what you will use as the address in any text links back to your site. |
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ezine |
| An electronic magazine. Most publishers of ezines are desperate for content and gladly publish well written, helpful articles and give you full credit as author, including a link to your website. |
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Flash |
| A technology used to create animated web pages (and page elements). |
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free reprint article |
| An article written by you and made freely available to other webmasters to publish on their websites. See also article PR. |
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| The search engine with the greatest coverage of the World Wide Web, and which is responsible for most search engine-referred traffic. Of approximately 11.5 billion pages on the World Wide Web, it is estimated that Google has indexed around 8.8 billion. This is one reason why it takes so long to increase your ranking! | |
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Google AdWords |
| See Sponsored Links. |
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Google PageRank |
| How Google scores a website's importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. By downloading the Google Toolbar, you can view the PR of any site you visit. |
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Google Toolbar |
| A free tool you can download. It becomes part of your browser toolbar. It's most useful features are it's PageRank display (which allows you to view the PR of any site you visit) and it's AutoFill function (when you're filling out an online form, you can click AutoFill, and it enters all the standard information automatically, including Name, Address, Zip code/Postcode, Phone Number, Email Address, Business Name, Credit Card Number (password protected), etc.) Once you've downloaded and installed the toolbar, you may need to set up how you'd like it to look and work by clicking Options (setup is very easy). NOTE: Google does record some information (mostly regarding sites visited). |
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HTML |
| HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the coding language used to create much of the information on the World Wide Web. Web browsers read the HTML code and display the page that code describes. |
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Internet |
| An interconnected network of computers around the world. |
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JavaScript |
| A programming language used to create dynamic website pages (e.g. interactivity). |
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keyword |
| A word which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches. This use known as targeting a keyword. Most websites actually target 'keyword phrases' because single keywords are too generic and it is very difficult to rank highly for them. |
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keyword density |
| A measure of the frequency of your keyword in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%. |
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keyword phrase |
| A phrase which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches. |
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link |
| A word or image on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. There are normally visual cues to indicate to the reader that the word or image is a link. |
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link path |
| Using text links to connect a series of page (i.e. page 1 connects to page 2, page 2 connects to page 3, page 3 connects to page 4, and so on). Search engine 'spiders' and 'robots' use text links to jump from page to page as they gather information about it, so it's a good idea to allow them traverse your entire site via text links. |
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link partner |
| A webmaster who is willing to put a link to your website on their website. Quite often link partners engage in reciprocal linking. |
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link popularity |
| The number of links to your website. Link popularity is the single most important factor in a high search engine ranking. Webmasters use a number of methods to increase their site's link popularity including article PR, link exchange (link partners / reciprocal linking), link buying, and link directories. |
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link text |
| The part of a text link that is visible to the reader. When generating links to your own site, they are most effective (in terms of ranking) if they include your keyword. |
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meta tag |
| A short note within the header of the HTML of your web page which describes some aspect of that page. These meta tags are read by the search engines and used to help assess the relevance of a site to a particular search. |
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natural search results |
| The 'real' search results. The results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are. |
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organic search results |
| See natural search results. |
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PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising) | See Sponsored Links. | |
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PageRank |
| See Google PageRank. |
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rank |
| Your position in the search results that display when someone searches for a particular word at a search engine. |
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reciprocal link |
| A mutual agreement between two webmasters to exchange links (i.e. they both add a link to the other's website on their own website). Most search engines (certainly Google) are sophisticated enough to detect reciprocal linking and they don't view it very favorably because it is clearly a manufactured method of generating links. Websites with reciprocal links risk being penalized. |
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robot |
| See spider. |
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robots.txt file |
| A file which is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed. This file sits in your site's root directory on the web server. (Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read. |
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Sandbox |
| Many SEO experts believe that Google 'sandboxes' new websites. Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site). Likewise, if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many hundreds or thousands) in the number of links back to your site, it may sandbox them for a period (or in fact penalize you by lowering your ranking or blacklisting your site altogether). |
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SEO |
| Search Engine Optimization. The art of making your website relevant and important so that it ranks high in the search results for a particular word. |
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SEO copywriter |
| A 'copywriter' who is not only proficient at web copy, but also experienced in writing copy which is optimized for search engines (and will therefore help you achieve a better search engine ranking for your website). |
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search engine |
| A search engine is an online tool which allows you to search for websites which contain a particular word or phrase. The most well known search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. |
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site map |
| A single page which contains a list of text links to every page in the site (and every page contains a text link back to the site map). Think of your site map as being at the center of a spider-web. |
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SPAM |
| Generally refers to unwanted and unrequested email sent en-masse to private email addresses. Also used to refer to websites which appear high in search results without having any useful content. The creators of these sites set them up simply to cash in on their high ranking by selling advertising space, links to other sites, or by linking to other sites of their own and thereby increasing the ranking of those sites. The search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and already have very efficient ways to detect SPAM websites and penalize them. |
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spider |
| Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out 'spiders' or 'robots'. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links. |
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Sponsored Links |
| Paid advertising which displays next to the natural search results. Customers can click on the ad to visit the advertiser's website. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers set their ads up to display whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labeled "Sponsored Links", and normally take up a smaller portion of the window. These ads work on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis (i.e. the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on their ad). |
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submit |
| You can submit your domain name to the search engines so that their 'spiders' or 'robots' will crawl your site. You can also submit articles to 'article submission sites' in order to have them published on the Internet. |
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text link |
| A word on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. Text links are normally blue and underlined. Text links are what 'spiders' or 'robots' use to jump from page to page and website to website. |
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URL |
| Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a particular page published on the Internet. Normally in the form http://www.yourbusinessname.com/AWebPage.htm. |
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web copy |
| See copy. |
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web copywriter |
| A 'copywriter' who understands the unique requirements of writing for an online medium. |
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webmaster |
| A person responsible for the management of a particular website. |
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wordcount |
| The number of words on a particular web page. |
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World Wide Web (WWW) |
| The vast array of documents published on the Internet. It is estimated that the World Wide Web now consists of approximately 11.5 billion pages. |
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More Questions? | ||
Sources http://ezinearticles.com/?An-SEO-Glossary---Common-SEO-Terms-Defined&id=78932
Glossary of Terms Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Glenn_Murray
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