We are going to attempt to take some of the mystique and confusion out of SEO, allowing you to better prepare your web pages and sites to rank as high as possible on the Engines and Directories. It is essential you utilize keyword intensive sales presentations coupled with PPC, Paid Inclusion, Linking Startegies and other Search Engine technologies.

Since AME Advertising was created primarly for those of us involved in Online Marketing, we will address Search Engines from a business standpoint. However, anyone with a website, be it personal, business or just informational, can use the same ideas and procedures to get their sites more easily found.

Search Engine:
A search engine is essentially just a program that searches documents for specific keywords and returns a list of documents where the keywords were found.

Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to gather as many documents as possible. Another program, reads the documents and creates an index based on the words contained in the documents. Each search engine uses it's own algorithm to create its indices so ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

The first thing to know is there is a difference between directories and engines.

Search Directories such as Yahoo!, Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and LookSmart (which powers MSN Search) are edited by humans. You have a better chance of getting listed on the search engines if you get included on the directories first.

Search Engines such as Google, AltaVista, and Fast Search use keyword seeking "spiders" that scour the Web collecting keyword matches.

Both Directories and Engines use Link Popularity to determine your ranking. A short note on reciprocal linkings and link farms. It is advisable to exchange links with only those sites related to your niche market. That way, you will be giving your visitors relevant links and the engines take the quality of links into account as well as the number of links pointing to your site.

Link Farms are businesses who's job is to supply you with an abundant amount of links presumably to trick the directories and engines into thinking you have a tremendous amount of people linking to you. Problems arise when you discover you are now linked to 100's of sites that have nothing in common with your niche market.
The engines and directories have actually banned sites for this activity.

To give you an example, let's use ProfitWebServices.com.
It is a site designed to help you to find the best products, services and resources available to help you succeed in an online business. Why would we possibly want to exchange links with an auto parts company or an online gambling or casino site? These are sites that contact us everyday with link exchange proposals. Why would we want to risk the engines telling us we aren't welcome anymore just to promote sites that aren't to our benefit?

There are a few sites out there that can supply you with quality links without risking the wrath of the search engines. The two that comes to mind immediately are

http://value-exchange.sitesell.com/
http://www.linkpartners.com/

Both offer their services for FREE and once you sign up, you will be contacted by other webmasters inquiring as to your desire to exchange links. This is totally your choice. If the links seem like a good fit for your site, accept the offer. If not you can decline.

When you start constructing your site there are several aspects to consider.

• Website Content is your #1 priority.

High placement starts with a unique, content intensive, website. The Search Engines are looking for sites delivering quality content far more than quantity to their users. Create pages that have substantial and relevant content related to the primary keywords for each page.

This is especially important to know if you are an affiliate for a program that gives you a pre-designed website. Take what they give you then create your own website using text to fully describe the purpose of your site. If you and 1000 other affiliates all use the predesigned website, the Search Engines will lump them all together one after another or worse yet, not include the sites at all.

Use your keywords in the content, but don't repeat them over and over.  Most search engines use  'keyword density' to rank sites.  This takes into account META Keywords, words in your TITLE, words in paragraph text, words in links to other pages, and even words in the 'ALT' text on your images.  The Title of your site is the most important keyword and may be used in your search engine listing along with the description of what your site is about.

• Important Meta Tags

The Title tag is the most important meta tag. Along with the description tag, the title tag is what will attract visitors to your website. When web surfers perform a search, the results are based on relevance and the more relevant the title and description the more visitors you will attract.

The Title tag should be between 4-15 words with approximately 20-50% of the words being your primary keywords. It is better to have a shorter title that features more of your keywords.

The Description tag is next in importance. This is what will be seen by those performing a search. Once again, the more you can describe the purpose of your site, the better the results and the more visitors. The Description tag should be between 10-25 words with approximately 20-30% of the words being your primary keywords. It is better to keep the description about 15 words or you risk having only a portion of your site description displayed.

The Keywords tags used to be the most important tags before people starting abusing them and adding keywords that weren't relevant to their particular website content.
As it is now, the search engines put little importance on the Keywords tags and more on keyword relevancy in the content of the site.

Even though this is true, Keywords tags should be included and should be between
5-9 words with approximately 50% being your primary keywords.
There are many people that still believe that using many keywords will get them a higher ranking but with the search engines using keyword relevancy in the content, if you use many keywords not related to the page content, you will be ranked lower.

• Link Popularity

Link popularity is very important among most search engines now. The more websites linking to yours the more important your website must be. Also, if the importance of a website that is linking to you is ranked high in that search engine, your link popularity will be greater. As mentioned before, http://www.linkpartners.com/ is an excellent site dedicated to supplying you with relevant links.

There are several companies offering to supply you with linking software which is supposed to make reciprocal linkings easier and automatic. While they do perform the job well, they are also expensive, costing $20/month or more. We used one for several months to see how it performed. We determined it performed well but we could put $20 a month to better use and created our own which you can see on our links page.

Feel free to submit your site to us if you feel there is a good fit. We manually approve all sites and will send you an email when you are included.

In conclusion, the real secret of a high ranking search engine position is a combination of relevant updated content, keyword density, a well written title and site description and increased link popularity.