Quinterox

In the past a company’s exposure to customers depended heavily on a good ad. Content, as always, was important but had little possibility of getting to the user than through an ad or a friend’s recommendation. The exposure an ad would provide was often expensive, lasted a short amount of time, and could be limited to a specific geographical area. In today’s web-focused world we see an increase in the importance of content as a way to attract customers via search engine results. In other words content is becoming increasingly important because of the way it is interpreted by search engines and served to the user. The proper implementation of SEO (search engine optimization) methods could lead to a business’ success, personal popularity, or both. In the following sections I will describe a few methods that you could implement on your website to acquire exposure to your business or self.

What is SEO?

What is search engine optimization? Often referred to as SEO, it is the act of editing a website to achieve a higher visibility to internet users querying a search engine with keywords. As a result of applying SEO methods to your website the supposed relevance of your site on a search engine’s result page will increase. Some popular search engines people and companies out there try to make are Google, Yahoo, Window’s Live Search
(“Top 10 Search Engines – Top Ten SEs.”).

SEO Requirements

Now you might be asking so what expensive tools do I need to download to optimize my website for search engines. The answer is none, however there are programs out there that claim to be able to optimize your website but they actually work against it because some employ sneaky techniques that might raise a red flag for search engines. If there is one thing you need to have in order help a search engines rush users to your website it is content. Without fresh, useful, content that people want no matter how many methods of SEO you apply, it won’t help a bit. So much for this post sounding like an infomercial, there is no such thing as easy money.

Who Needs SEO

So now that you know what it is we are going to talk about some important uses of SEO. One entity to whom it is very important to is businesses. Businesses have a huge need to find people (or other businesses) who need what goods or services they are selling. This is why it is important to make sure they have a persistent easily-acquirable presence to consumers whether it is on television, the paper, or online (“Importance of Web presence.”).

Consumers also benefit from a business’ websites being search engine optimized. For example: a consumer might be seeking a review for a product online that they are willing to purchase but aren’t quite sure about. They could Google the name of their product followed by the word reviews to which they will be presented with an array of websites that have been search engine optimized in some way describing the content they are seeking. The end result, one company sells a product, another becomes a popular destination for the user, and if all goes well the user buys the phone he/she wanted.

Another type of person that benefits from the popularity SEO methods can bring to a website is bloggers. Bloggers blog for many different reasons some of which could be to gain relationships in on online community, it’s their job, the job they are trying to acquire, their diary, or because it’s a hobby. Whatever the reason their blogging is an attempt to make a web presence for themselves (“5 Reasons To Contribute To A Blog”), which if properly applied SEO will boost their website and in effect their popularity.

How Do We SEO?

So far we have done nothing but talked about what search engine optimization is and who uses it and why but have not talked about how to actually apply these methods. One thing you should know is that there are many different methods the pros suggest you use but this paper will only demonstrate the basic and a couple of advanced methods of SEO. At the end of the paper there will be a list of additional online sources you can visit if you are interested in more.

<HTML lang="fr">

<title>Elk QA3 - messaging phone - Ottowola USA</title>

<meta name="description" content="Ottowola Elk QA3 helps you stay connected with your friends. Features a full keyboard, or turn it upright for your traditional phone capabilities.."/>

In the HTML Body

Use adequate elements for important body content titles.

<h1 >Elk QA3 – My Review</h1>

Use adequate descriptions for links and media.

USE

<a href=”http://mywebsite.com/pictures/ElkQA3a_phone.jpg”>Elk QA3 phone</a>

<img src=”http://mywebsite.com/pictures/ElkQA3a_phone.jpg” alt=”Elk QA3 phone“ title=”Elk QA3 phone“>Elk QA3 phone </img>

DO NOT USE

<a href=”http://mywebsite.com/stuff/picture0001.jpg”>Click Here</a>

<img src=”http://mywebsite.com/stuff/picture0001.jpg”></img>

Don’t share your website’s popularity by posting links without the attribute rel=”nofollow”. Without this the other website will gain some popularity off of yours. It could be problematic specifically if a spammer manages to post links on your site to their causing search engines to consider you to be part of a “bad neighborhood” (“Webmaster guidelines – Webmasters/Site owners Help.”).

ALLOW

<a href=”http://johnswebsite.com/” rel=”nofollow”>John’s Development Website</a>

DO NOT ALLOW

<a href=”http://johnswebsite.com/“>John’s Development Website</a>

Similarly if you find a legit way to get a more important site (for example CNN.COM) to link to you, your page’s rank is more likely to increase since you will get little boost off its popularity.

If you have Javascript menus, make sure you have a sitemap or a page that contains all the links on your site. Some robots do not operate with Javascript therefore being blind to these links. Below is an example.

JavaScript Dropdown

Another way around this problem is to include a <noscript> tag within your menu layout which will only be visible only to users without Javascript i.e. Robots.

Avoid html frames. Users can be sent to the incorrect frame and spiders might not be able to easily find the intended content. Also it makes a web page hard to bookmark.

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/
Sitemap: http://www.mywebsite.com/Sitemap.xml

http://johnswebsite.com/categories/programs/photo_editor/

http://johnswebsite.com/index.asp?cat=12&subcat=5&prog=25

My Conclusions

There are many more techniques to optimize your website than the ones illustrated on this document. As stated earlier, it is important to keep new, fresh, useful content flowing into your website, as search engine index’s update every day. It is also beneficial to the blogger/website owners to socialize with others with similar websites and build a reputation so that links could be traded and popularity could be shared. Of course it is always important to make sure that the other sites do not participate in spamming which could hurt your page rank. To summarize, search engine optimization works best with the proper application of three different things: content, adequate page construction, and social exposure.