Big Money Forum >> Online Business

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine marketing is the greatest marketing skill for an online business. The reason is you are running commercials and campaigns 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can't get that kind of exposure and advertising from any other source such as television commercials and newspaper advertising. The most brilliant benefit to search engine marketing is it's free to use and implement. What makes it extremely effective is when you know how to target your visitors and bring them to your site through the search engine. Even more important is to beat your competition at the search engine. Here at big money forums, we call this method "search engine optimization", also known as SEO in jargon speak.

You would be surprised how many people have a hard time getting traffic to their internet business through the search engines. Some people pay thousands of dollars for a search engine optimizer to fix their sites and optimize them. In my experience, I've done this, but it's not worth it if you know just the basics. All you need to do is ask questions on our Online Business Marketing Forum. This is the all in one forum for development of an online business, so if you are specifically looking for help in search engine optimization, visit our Search Engine Optimization Forum.

Coding Level Search Engine Optimization

Now that I have shown you these resources and you can now find help or learn about search engine optimization, it is now time to learn some of the basics of this optimization. The first thing we do is look at the code and design of your website. Search engines like seeing a high content to code ratio, meaning they prefer long text articles (most of the time) and less code. So right off the bat, if you know HTML, you would want to convert your entire site over to CSS. This is a pain but that's what works for me, and it makes sense. A search engine is going to like a cleaner site, such as less code to index through.

You may also find a forum to learn about CSS as well in the resources above. Now there are some important things you want to know that can get you in trouble with search engines and receive penalties from poorly optimized pages. One of the biggest that I learned was make sure all your text is different than your background color. If you are using an image as a background MAKE SURE the background behind that image is not the same color as your text. This is something that many people may not thing about, such as having a dark image background and white text, while the background behind your image is white!

You know you are doing poorly in internet search marketing when you are not getting any visitors and have pages in the supplemental search results, which are known as the second rate pages that never bring in traffic.

Google, Yahoo and MSN optimization

These are the three big search engines, but Google is the best of them all. Each search engine likes different things in a website. In my experience, MSN likes short content such as 100-200 pages if you want to rank in there. Yahoo likes content similar to this, but also puts in more Emphasis into alt tags and Meta tags, which should be optimized.

Google on the other hand likes long articles and contents, similar to the size of this article ;) If you found this page, it was likely on Google and ranked fairly decent. This is what I learned in my years of personal experience in internet search optimization.

All the search engines still use Meta tags, but in a different way than you would think. I used to ignore these since it is commonly known that people abused these to take advantage of the search engines and they publicly stated the values of these are diminished. I have noticed in my own experience that they still check them to make sure you are not duplicating them or being lazy and putting the same keyword on every page. You get bonuses if you do the extra work and change them so they are not all duplicated. I've noticed that my supplemental results have been placed in the first rate index.

The most important rule in all online optimization campaigns is to do original content. If you duplicate the content of other sites or your own content, you will suffer in the search engines. Google sees hard work when you write your own pages and lots of it. You need to write your content regularly such as a few times a month so Google sees that it needs to come by more often to get the latest content. Here is a secret! The more it comes by, the higher it ranks your pages. For instance, look how high ranking this article is in Google and it only took me 20 minutes to write it. It seems hard but that's about all (the basics) it takes if you want visitors! This also shows that online business is like any other business and requires hard work to be successful. Check out our forum if you need help with SEO or need more specific advice, there is much more to it that this of course!