Increase your online ranking with this beginner guide to SEO!
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of getting a site to rank high in the various search engines in order to attract potential customers. With this new edition of a bestseller, you'll learn the ins and outs and best practices of successful SEO in order to make your website content more search-engine friendly so that it ranks higher among search engines and draws high-volume traffic.
- Covers search engine basics to help you get started
- Introduces new coverage on content marketing and reuse, new tracking tools, platform management, and reputation management
- Details ways to build search-engine friendly sites, register your site with directories and indexes, and use analysis tools to track results
- Explains how to use link popularity in order to boost rankings
- Zeroes in on advertising your site by using pay-per-click options
Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 5th Edition is the fun and friendly place to start learning how to move your site to the top of the rankings.
Increase your online ranking with this beginner guide to SEO!
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of getting a site to rank high in the various search engines in order to attract potential customers. With this new edition of a bestseller, you'll learn the ins and outs and best practices of successful SEO in order to make your website content more search-engine friendly so that it ranks higher among search engines and draws high-volume traffic.
- Covers search engine basics to help you get started
- Introduces new coverage on content marketing and reuse, new tracking tools, platform management, and reputation management
- Details ways to build search-engine friendly sites, register your site with directories and indexes, and use analysis tools to track results
- Explains how to use link popularity in order to boost rankings
- Zeroes in on advertising your site by using pay-per-click options
Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 5th Edition is the fun and friendly place to start learning how to move your site to the top of the rankings.
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Overview
Increase your online ranking with this beginner guide to SEO!
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of getting a site to rank high in the various search engines in order to attract potential customers. With this new edition of a bestseller, you'll learn the ins and outs and best practices of successful SEO in order to make your website content more search-engine friendly so that it ranks higher among search engines and draws high-volume traffic.
- Covers search engine basics to help you get started
- Introduces new coverage on content marketing and reuse, new tracking tools, platform management, and reputation management
- Details ways to build search-engine friendly sites, register your site with directories and indexes, and use analysis tools to track results
- Explains how to use link popularity in order to boost rankings
- Zeroes in on advertising your site by using pay-per-click options
Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 5th Edition is the fun and friendly place to start learning how to move your site to the top of the rankings.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781118336854 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Wiley |
Publication date: | 07/31/2012 |
Series: | For Dummies Books |
Pages: | 456 |
Product dimensions: | 7.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Peter Kent is an e-commerce consultant specializing in search engine optimization. Peter has provided consulting services to companies such as TowerRecords.com, Zillow, and hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses.
Read an Excerpt
Search Engine Optimization For Dummies
By Peter Kent
John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0-7645-6758-6Chapter One
Surveying the Search Engine LandscapeIn This Chapter
* Discovering where people search
* Understanding the difference between search sites and search systems
* Distilling thousands of search sites down to about a dozen search systems
* Preparing your search strategy
You've got a problem. You want people to visit your Web site; that's the purpose, after all, to bring people to your site to buy your products, or learn about them, or hear about the cause you support, or for whatever other purpose you've built the site. So you've decided you need to get traffic from the search engines - not an unreasonable conclusion, as you find out in this chapter. But there are so many search engines! There are the obvious ones, the Googles, AOLs, Yahoo!s, and MSNs of the world, but you've probably also heard of others - HotBot, Dogpile, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, EarthLink, LookSmart ... even Amazon provides a Web search on almost every page. There's Lycos and InfoSpace, Teoma and WiseNut, Mamma.com, and Web-Crawler. To top it all off, you've seen advertising asserting that for only $49.95 (or $19.95, or $99.95, or whatever sum seems to make sense to the advertiser), you too can have your Web site listed in hundreds, nay, thousands of search engines. You may have even used some of these services, only to discover that the flood of traffic you were promised turns up missing.
Well, I've got some good news. You can forget almost all the names I just listed - well, at least you can after you've read this chapter. The point of this chapter is to take a complicated landscape of thousands of search sites and whittle it down into the small group of search systems that really matter. (Search sites? Search systems? Don't worry, I explain the distinction in a moment.)
If you really want to, you can jump to the end of the chapter to see the list of search systems you need to worry about and ignore the details. But I've found that, when I give this list to people, they look at me like I'm crazy because they've never heard of most of the names, and they know that some popular search sites aren't on the list. This chapter explains why.
What Are Search Engines and Directories?
The term search engine has become the predominant term for search system or search site, but before reading any further, you need to understand the different types of search, um, thingies, you're going to run across. Basically, you need to know about four thingies:
TIP
Here's how to see the difference between Yahoo!'s search results and the Yahoo! directory. Go to yahoo.com, type a word into the Search box, and click the Search button. The list of Web sites that appears is what Yahoo! calls the Yahoo! Search results, which are currently provided by Google. But notice the Directory tab at the top of the page; or, underneath some of the search results, you see a line that says something like More Sites about: Arthritis. Click either the tab or link, and you end up in the Yahoo! Directory. (You can go directly to the directory by using dir. yahoo.com.)
Keeping the terms straight
Here are a few additional terms that you see scattered throughout the book:
Google and the Open Directory Project provide search results to hundreds of search sites. In fact, most of the world's search sites get their search results from elsewhere (see Figure 1-3).
Why bother with search engines?
Why bother using search engines? Because search engines represent the single most important source of new Web site visitors.
You may have heard that most Web site visits begin at a search engine. Well, this is not true. It was true several years ago, and many people continue to use these outdated statistics because they sound good - "80 percent of all Web site visitors reach the site through a search engine," for instance. However, in 2003, that claim was finally put to rest. The number of search-originated site visits dropped below the 50-percent mark. Most Web site visitors reach their destinations by either typing a URL - a Web address - into their browsers and going there directly or by clicking a link on another site that takes them there. Most visitors do not reach their destinations by starting at the search engines.
However, search engines are still extremely important for a number of reasons:
Where Do People Search?
You can search for Web sites at many places. Literally thousands of sites, in fact, provide the ability to search the Web. (What you may not realize, however, is that all these sites search only a small subset of the World Wide Web.)
However, most searches are carried out at just a small number of search sites. How do the world's most popular search sites rank? That depends on how you measure popularity: the percentage of Internet users who visit a site (audience reach); the total number of visitors; the total number of searches carried out at a site; or the total number of hours that visitors spend searching at the site. Each measurement provides a slightly different ranking, though all provide a similar picture, with the same sites appearing on the list, though some in slightly different positions.
The following list runs down the world's most popular search sites, based on the total search hours at each site during a one-month period, as compiled in a 2003 Nielsen/NetRatings study:
Google.com 18,700,000 hours
AOL.com 15,500,500 hours
Yahoo.com 7,100,000 hours
MSN.com 5,400,000 hours
AskJeeves.com 2,300,000 hours
InfoSpace.com 1,100,000 hours
AltaVista.com 800,000 hours
Overture.com 800,000 hours
Netscape.com 700,000 hours
EarthLink.com 400,000 hours
LookSmart.com 200,000 hours
Lycos.com 200,000 hours
Remember, this is a list of search sites, not search systems. In some cases, the sites have own their own systems. Google provides its own search results, but AOL and MSN do not. (AOL gets its results from Google, and MSN's results come from Inktomi, a company owned by Yahoo! - at least at the time of this writing.)
The fact that some sites get results from other search systems means two things. First, the numbers in the preceding list are somewhat misleading. They suggest that Google has around a third of all the search hours. But Google also feeds AOL its results - add AOL's hours to Google's, and you've got almost two thirds of all search hours. Clearly the Google search system is far more important than the Google search site. In fact, the Google search system also feeds four more systems on this list - Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, and EarthLink - and many smaller sites that don't appear on this list. Some estimates put Google's share of the Web's search results as high as 75 or 80 percent. (That statistic will change soon, perhaps even by the time you read this, as you find out a little later in this chapter - Yahoo will stop using Google results soon.)
The second thing to understand is that you can ignore some of these systems. At present, for example, and for the foreseeable future, you don't need to worry about AOL.com. Even though it's probably the world's second most important search site, you can forget about it. Sure, keep it in the back of your mind, but as long as you remember that Google feeds AOL, you need to worry about Google only.
When you get to the search sites that appear below Lycos in the preceding list, the sites become dramatically less important. Google, according to this chart, has almost 100 times the search hours spent at Lycos. And the first 11 sites on this list combined have 265 times the search hours of Lycos. (However, as I explain in a moment, this list doesn't include some important search systems.)
Now reexamine the list of the world's most important search sites and see what you remove so you can get closer to a list of sites you care about. Check out Table 1-1 for the details.
Based on the information in Table 1-1, you can whittle down your list of sites to four: Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, and AltaVista. These four search sites are all important, and Google is also an important search system, feeding three quarters of the world's search results to AOL, Yahoo!, Netscape, EarthLink, and many other search sites. Teoma/Ask Jeeves is an important search-system feeder, too, providing results to many smaller search sites.
TIP
Okay, so you visited one or two of the sites that you just crossed off and found that you can submit your Web site to the index at that site. What's going on here is that the search site is selling paid inclusion into the search system that feeds it. (I talk about paid inclusion in Chapter 9.) When you pay Lycos to submit your site, for example, Lycos takes your money and then places your site into FAST/AlltheWeb - which isn't a Lycos search system. Lycos is simply acting as a reseller.
REMEMBER
Some important systems are not important sites. For example, MSN, one of the world's most important search sites, gets its search results from Inktomi and LookSmart. To take this into account, make the following changes to your list:
Continues...
Excerpted from Search Engine Optimization For Dummies by Peter Kent Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Part I: Search Engine Basics 7
Chapter 1: Surveying the Search Engine Landscape 9
Chapter 2: Search Results, Deconstructed 23
Chapter 3: Your One-Hour, Search Engine–Friendly Web Site Makeover 33
Chapter 4: Beating the Competition — Planning a Powerful Search Engine Strategy 49
Chapter 5: Making Your Site Useful and Visible 67
Part II: Building Search Engine–Friendly Sites 83
Chapter 6: Picking Powerful Keywords 85
Chapter 7: Creating Pages That Search Engines Love 107
Chapter 8: Avoiding Things That Search Engines Hate 135
Chapter 9: Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap 163
Chapter 10: Bulking Up Your Site — Competing with Content 179
Chapter 11: Finding Traffic Through Local-Search Marketing 203
Part III: Adding Your Site to the Indexes and Directories 227
Chapter 12: Getting Your Pages into the Search Engines 229
Chapter 13: Submitting to the Directories 243
Chapter 14: Product Search: Remember the Shopping Directories and Retailers 259
Part IV: After You’ve Submitted Your Site 283
Chapter 15: Using Link Popularity to Boost Your Position 285
Chapter 16: Finding Sites to Link to Yours 309
Chapter 17: Even More Great Places to Get Links 333
Chapter 18: Social Networking — Driven by Drivel 343
Chapter 19: Video: Putting Your Best Face Forward 353
Chapter 20: When Google Bites Back: A Guide to Catastrophe 359
Part V: The Part of Tens 377
Chapter 21: Ten Things to Know and Do When Picking an SEO Firm 379
Chapter 22: Ten-Plus Myths and Mistakes 385
Chapter 23: Ten-Plus Ways to Stay Updated 393
Chapter 24: Ten-Plus Useful Things to Know 399
Index 415