Pandia Search Engine Marketing 101

PART 1

A beginner's guide to search engine optimization and promotion

Search engine marketing is the art of using search engines as a vehicle for getting more visitors to your website.

If you get higher rankings in search results, more searchers are likely to click on your listing, leading to a steady stream of interested readers or -- hopefully -- happy customers.

Pandia's Search Engine Marketing 101 will give you the basics of search engine promotion -- knowledge you may use in your own optimization efforts or when buying services from others.

Written by Per and Susanne Koch.

Tutorial Index

1 Introduction
2 Selecting Search Keywords
3 Search Engine Friendly Code
4 Search Engine Friendly Webdesign
5 Link Popularity
6 Search Engine Submissions

What's in a word?

Search engine experts use a large number of terms to describe the art of getting higher search engine rankings. Search engine optimization (SEO) has been the most common one.

However, some feel that this term limits the description to on page optimization, i.e. changes you make to the individual webpage to gain a higher ranking. Once upon a time, this was what search engine optimization was all about. Now, however, search engines adds several "off page" factors to their ranking algorithm, including the number of pages a site has, how many other sites are linking to it etc.

Because of this, some prefer to use terms like search engine promotion or positioning instead.

Several experts (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch included) have argued that we need an even broader term, a term that encompass the use of pay per click search engines and to a certain extent Web design, hence the term search engine marketing or -- even -- search marketing.

PANDIA SEARCH CENTRAL

How search engines work

Search engines are based on computer programs that explore the Net in search of webpages. They do this by using so-called "spiders," "crawlers," or "robots".

Like any human surfer, the robots are able to follow the links present on webpages. When finding a new webpage, they copy all or parts of the text present on the page into their search engine database.

Other spiders revisit these pages on a regular interval in order to register changes or dead links. The interval varies greatly from search engine to search engine and from site to site.

Ranking algorithm

The search engine will have billions of webpages in its database. In order to deliver relevant results, the search engine companies have developed special ranking algorithms that calculate the order of search query results.

By a search query we mean the keyword or keyword phrase the visitor enters into the search form of the search engine.

A special program analyzes the search query, and then searches the database for pages that contain this keyword or keyword phrase.

Next it analyzes every single one of the relevant pages in order to determine how important that phrase is on that page. The pages the search engine find most relevant will be listed first.

For instance, if you are searching for "Albert Einstein," and the search engine finds a main headline on that page containing the phrase "Albert Einstein," it will guess that this page is fairly relevant to your needs. If, on the other hand, it finds the phrase only once, buried in a long text, it will reckon it is less relevant.

Getting search engine points

The search engine gives each and every page points based on how often and where it finds the keyword phrase (the keyword location). Some locations give more points than others, the exact factor varying from search engine to search engine.

Search engines also take other factors into consideration, including link popularity. We will come back to that.

One very important part of search engine marketing is to know where to put the relevant keyword phrases in your webpages.

Designing webpages for search engines

The search engine does not "see" the webpage the way we see it; it reads only the text-based code behind it. This is will help you to have an elementary insight into HTML, the coding language used to produce webpages. If you do not know any HTML, you could for instance read through one of the beginner's guides to HTML.

If you do not have the patience for this, by all means read on -- we will help you understand. Keep in mind, though, that an HTML file is a plain text file that contains the text you can read on a web page, as well as information on how the web browser is to format it. We are going to look at the elements of this text file.

On search directories

This guide is about search engines only. There are also so-called "search directories" produced by human beings that visit and consider websites for inclusion. The most important ones are the Yahoo! Directory and The Open Directory. In order to get listed in these, you have to use entirely different techniques.

See our article on "Preparing your site for the search directories") for more information.

GO TO THE NEXT PAGE: On targeting the right keyword phrases. >>>

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