Search engine optimization tips in this category are devoted to the art of building your webpages effectively and making them interesting for the search engines. The articles under this heading describe general notions and terms of the search engine optimization field, providing you with a comprehensive introduction into SEO (search engine optimization).
The definition of search engine optimization is simple; it is a number of techniques used to make webpages attractive to search engines and benefit from high listings via changes to a site to make it more search engine compatible. Nowadays, search engines are complicated and protected systems, and search engine optimization becomes merely a science.
 

Mainly, search engine optimization tips and techniques are important as you can get traffic for free. You can obtain the same or even bigger number of visitors by optimization alone without having to pay for advertising. You can find out that many Web surfers tend to ignore paid (sponsored) results, which are displayed by the search engines, but if you site is shown on the top of the first page of SE results for the query, you are able to turn those surfers into visitors.
 

It is vital for every site owner to keep an eye on how his website ranks in the top search engines and directories. The truth is that your company’s site prestige and reputation is seriously damaged if its rankings are not in the top ten for the related keywords, even more so if rankings in search engines are lower than top thirty. If this is the case, you might as well be invisible on the Web. According to researchers at Forrestre Research, Inc., users hardly ever go beyond the top thirty search engine rankings for a single search. It is estimated that the top thirty search engine results receive over ninety percent of search traffic.

Here you can find out how Internet consumers mostly find websites, according to the survey of Forrestre Research, Inc.:

Search engines: 81%
Link from another site: 59%
Viral marketing (word of mouth): 56%
TV: 48%
Guessed URL: 41%
Online advertising: 20%
Radio: 19%
Direct mail: 10%
The problem with search engine optimization is that every site owner does it, so when a new technique gets into public domain, it becomes too popular too soon. Consequently, search engines answer to this step by reducing the weight in their ranking algorithms of such techniques in order to maintain the usability of their search results.


Nevertheless, search engine optimization offers distinctive features that are low risk, cost effective, provide reliable and constant results, brand awareness, and affordability. For websites, every little bit helps, so search engine optimization tips and techniques are vital for any business and every site owner. Search engine optimization is what helps you bring your message to the broadest and most targeted audience. It helps you not to get lost in the huge amount of competition because search engine traffic never stops if you have once achieved good ranking. Search engines promote your pages 24/7. Such important showing as ROI is well worthy and fast due to the search engine optimization as you get only targeted traffic to a site with the help of SEO.
 

Now you can see that search engines work and features should also be well known. Without knowledge of ranking algorithms and the way result listing is generating, most of your work can be idle or invisible for search engines, so you should make your site attractive to computer robot programs called spiders, which most search engines use. They find the pages for future inclusion via the links in the pages from their database. In general, links and their quality play very important role for search engine optimization. Moreover, speaking about search engine optimization tips and techniques, we should mention that, “Content and links share the kingdom.” Search engine optimizers argue about the prevalence of link popularity and believe that it always will be a key component in getting top ranking, but let’s start from the beginning.
 
What Search Engines and Directories Take Into Consideration?

As you know, spiders (which most search engines use) regard your site as HTML code only, so your first task will be to get full notion of the structure of HTML document. Spiders work in the following way: at first, they select and build search engine database of pages. After that, spiders follow links of the already known sites. Therefore, your page becomes the subject matter of search engine spider. What will a spider see or ignore?
 

Title

Speaking about tags optimization, we should start from title tag as all the search engines consider the keywords it contains. These keywords influence the ranking because search engines give them a great deal of weight in their ranking system. It is true that search engines pay attention on them during estimating your pages’ relevancy towards keywords. However, keywords are important when your title tag finally appears in the SERP (search engine result page). Remember that the interests of real people and all search engines are the same, so your title (which must help identify relevant keyword phrases) should be attractive for the surfers of the Web as well.
 

Description

The next HTML tag is the meta description tag. The content of this tag will be shown in the search result list of most search engines and directories. Try to make it search engine friendly. However, there is some thought that the description tag is not important for search engine optimization but as this work is easy enough it’s better to create some proper sentences that incorporate important keyword phrases. However, if you have no meta description tag on your site, search engines make it for you via selection of text where appear keyword phrases important for users while searching or the first few words of your webpage. Therefore, in order to avoid misunderstanding and bad results, description also deserves your attention.
 

Content

The main idea here is to make your content focused on the relevant theme throughout the site using targeted keyword phrases and making it in a way that reads naturally. It will help to avoid the situation when a site attracted lots of visitors but confuses them by content written with only purpose to stuff keywords here and there.
 

Quality

This parameter is more important for directory submitting as your site will be reviewed by a directory editor. The quality of the site means you should focus your site design on usefulness and comprehensiveness. Your site will attract visitors not because of the keen graphics or the smart domain name, but rather for information contained in your pages, which will enlighten them and answer the purpose of query.
 

Popularity

Link popularity is a very important factor that influences site relevance in the search engine ranking process. It is widely known that all of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links pointing to them, so getting relevant links from other sites is huge aid for your site. However, it can be a daunting task. Links pointing to your site from low relevant sites can hardly help your pages. Try to avoid low ranking, low traffic, or unrelated sites while you are looking for link partners; otherwise, these links will be nearly worthless.
A last but vital factor is search engine optimization itself, but we should also mention that each of the major search engines has its distinctive shade for optimizing the site. That’s why search engine optimization is the art of getting higher visibility across today’s most important search engines.


Usually for indexing, crawler-based engines consider more factors than those they can find on your pages. They are so-called “off-the-page” factors. In order to enhance popularity of your site for search engines, you should pay attention to the balance of link exchange, text used in links that point to you, what the Page Rank of the linking pages is, whether the page is present in some directories under related categories, among other factors. All these factors will be regarded by the spider before putting your page into an index. You can also artificially increase your page’s relevance by “on-the-page” factors. This is a very important thing to consider when building successful site, too. Using targeted keywords, adjusting the corresponding areas of HTML code, and other factors can help you in developing a nice site, but, of course, you can hardly control other pages on the Internet, those which link to you. Therefore, off-the-page relevance prevails in the crawler’s eyes.
Another important section is optimization for a particular search engine. While all the major engines use different algorithms, you can play on the main purpose of all of them because the main their purpose is providing the searcher with the most relevant results available. It is the one common thread that helps your site to rank highly across all the major engines. Most of rules and search engine optimization tips for particular engine can facilitate you efforts in this way.
 

Optimizing for MSN could be formulated similar to the optimization tips and rules for all the major search engines. There are important both off-the-page and on-the-page factors when ranking. To rank highly on MSN, one needs to build a solid sized site, get a number of relevant links, and use balanced number of properly chosen keywords and quality content. Start from getting your site listed in the directories. The effects of the site and inbound links can be picked up very quickly, and you can rank well with good search engine optimization efforts in a few months on MSN. To rank well on the Yahoo! search engine, you should follow all the search engine optimization tips and techniques mentioned for MSN’s search engine. The distinctive factor for Yahoo! engine will be links and content of your site. More detailed information can be found in the Yahoo! devoted section of our site.
 

Google, which combines search engine optimization tips as for MSN as for Yahoo! search engines, regards even more factors. So we should take a closer and detailed look on its demands as a leading search engine. While Google would like you to believe that PageRank algorithm is main principle of their search technology, other factors are also regarded for site relevancy. Therefore, taking into consideration the leading place of this search engine, it is easy to see why every webmaster and website owner is primarily concerned about attaining Google rankings. Link building strategy plays an important role as far as the best practices in search engine optimization, as do quality content, size of the website, age of links, and so on.
 

In conclusion, optimizing for a new site can grow little by little, starting from the search engine, which will rank you more easily and qucikly. Gradually, you can develop your website popularity and number of links, which will help you to target more sophisticated and significant engine like Google. As we mentioned in the beginning, search engines strive to improve the quality of their search results, so optimization of your site should be continuous in nature for achieving better result in ranking.