Search Engines, and What They Look For - SEO

SEO - Marketing Methods

What will be covered?

In this section, we will delve into what a Search engine physically searches for. This is very important marketing information, as you will begin to understand how to gear the verbiage on your website to gain more traffic. These are basically Website Optimization techniques, more commonly known as "Search Engine Optimization" (which is the technique through which a person can maximize, or "market" their web-page to get better "exposure"). We all hear talk about "making the first page" of a Google or Yahoo search, and this information is meant to help you understand why and how to do that, and in what cases it may be useful.

Please note that there are many advertising pitfalls through which you can actually lose "rank" (which I will discuss later), and get behind, so read carefully, and with anything you do, it is at your own risk. These are tried and true gidelines, but there are other idiosycrancies that you must be aware of. I will note as many of these items as possible as I continue adding solid information to help you market your website more efficiently, and in the end...gain more traffic.

Search Engine Optimization – Title Weight
(Don't name your website without reading this first)

It truly is more of an art, than a science, understanding what exactly a search engine looks for, and how it would relate to a local business, such as our South Bend, Elkhart IN. example.

Search engines will not release their sorting process (for obvious reasons that people would take advantage of it), not to mention, they make changes all the time.

Here are a few of the basics:

1. They put weighted averages on certain items:
In other words, the Website Name will carry a higher weight than the description of the site. The description carries more weight than the content. Information higher in a paragraph may carry more weight than info below, and so one and so forth…

2. They look for “content in keywords:”
Let’s look at our example where I typed in “carpet cleaners south bend” into the search bar.
First of all, Google will look at the title, and place the majority of the weight on the closest matching Website:

Let’s say there are three competing websites in the area:
www.Southbendcarpetcleaners.com
www.Bobs-upholstery-cleaning.com
www.South-bend-carpet.com

Who do you think is most likely going to show up first???

The first website: www.southbendcarpetcleaners.com – would likely be the lowest ranking. The reason is that although Google and other Search Engines do have "logic" capabilities of sorting what they think are the correct words or phrases, you can't be fully assured that they understand how or where to separate the words. It doesn’t see the site as South Bend Carpet Cleaners, it sees it just like you see it…As one word. The person would have literally had to type in the whole thing as one word exactly as it appears.

The second website: Bobs-upholstery-cleaning.com – would be weighted second in-line. A couple important things to note: Dashes in a website name are seen the same way to Google as spaces. Google sees the keywords “Bobs upholstery cleaning”. The first downfall to this site is that people have a tendency to want to put their name in their actual URL (or Website Name). The problem with that is no new prospect will type “Bob’s” anything unless they are searching for Bob already. In other words, Bob is a waste of a word that people type in more often, like Carpet, or South Bend (for area searches). Now, you can make the argument that there is not a single exact matching word in this, so why would it carry so much more weight than the first example? The answer is that search engines also look for relating words. Carpet and Upholstery are often used interchangeably, cleaning is a variation of cleaners, etc.

The third website: happens to have three exact matching phrases…Needless to say, it will have the highest weight of the other two examples by a long shot.

There are certainly other tweaks that can drawn out even the last example. For more information, feel free to visit my site for other answers, or contact me if you would like to discuss very affordable, simple ways to get your website off the ground.

Search Engine Optimization - Content is King

Understand Content flow is critical to website exposure. Search engines only have so many ways of searching sites to find who is and is not worth placing on a first page rather than the 400,000 page. One of those ways is by the content, or what is physically being written into your web-pages.

Let’s assume I design and sell marketing materials in the Elkhart and South Bend area. On my site, I want to showcase my materials, and talk about the items I sell. Well, the amount of content I place on the site is important. Talking about my marketing products (posters, postcards, or flyers), my website services, or my internet marketing solutions are critical to have literally “stated” on the site. Also, the locations I serve, whether in South Bend, IN., Elkhart, or Mishawaka, or whether I service nationally or internationally, naming some of the areas serviced is important as well. The reason is that if someone is searching Google for a local company that develops marketing materials, let’s say posters, and they have to be local, as the client may want to have that person visit their company, or take pictures, the client may type into Google, something like this: “South Bend Marketing Posters”.

When Google reads (and it literally reads) the site, it will see how those words, and similar words are referenced. If you have a good deal of content with words like South Bend, or posters, or marketing, or even advertising (remember, it looks for related words as well – advertising and marketing are related keywords), you are more likely to get a higher “rank”, therefore resulting in a higher page listing by that search engine.

The closer you are to the front page of a high traffic search page, the more traffic your business will likely see. The amount of content that is physically relevant to what you do and how you do it, the higher natural ranking you should see. The more you write about your products or services, the more you are utilizing proper search engine optimization techniques that will help you land the front pages of specific searches.

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