Ever felt intimidated at the convoluted, jargon-ridden information about Internet marketing for small businesses available on the Net? Ever been horrified by the huge fees the experts charge, putting search engine optimization beyond your own means? Ever thought: What exactly is search engine optimization anyway, and can I do it myself?

The answer is: Yes, you can! The basics of search engine optimization in applied web marketing are simple. It's all to do with the keyword content of your text copy, and can be summarized in seven points.

1. Register a good domain name which reflects what your site is about. Even if you are an established business, don't register www.FredJones.com if you make widgets. Rather, you want to register something like www.BestWidgets.com because that would inspire confidence in people looking for quality widgets who would not necessarily have heard of Fred Jones the widget-maker.

2. Name your page URLs based on reasons similar to the above for your web promotion, except now you can be more specific. Search engines like to know what your page is about. Name a page after a product (BigYellowWidgets.htm) or a service or action (Buy-Widgets-by-Post.htm) on one of the sales pages.

3. The text in the title tag is crucial in letting search engines know what each page is about. Put your important keywords in your title tags, using both the singular and plural versions (people will search for both) and make these tags different and specific for each page. For example, "Widgets and After Sales Widget Services". Whatever you do, don't call the home page "Index", but treat it almost as a mini-description.

4. The other tags (at the top of the html page) between the two "HEAD" tags are not as important as the title tag, but the description tag is still used by some search engines in displaying what you would like web users to see when they scroll down a page of search results. Some search engines don't use the description tag at all; others, like Google, sometimes use part of it together with part of the main body text surrounding prominent keywords on your page. So you may as well treat the description tag seriously; make it brief (about 25 to 30 words) and as comprehensive as possible in the short space allowed. Make sure you have your popular keywords included within your description tag. The ALT tag is used for a very short description of an image or graphic file, and is what is displayed if you allow your mouse pointer to hover above a graphic. These days it is not considered important for search engines. The COMMENT tag is never displayed on the body page, and is used by coders and designers as an instruction or reminder to themselves about what that section of html coding should be doing; in the past, some webmasters in their quest for website promotion and search engine ranking used to stuff keywords in the comments tags, but now it is generally acknowledged that the main search engines pay little or no attention to these.

5. Keyword density. Each search engine has its own preference as to how many times a keyword phrase appears on the page in order to signify the relevance of that keyword phrase (in other words, in order to help the search engine understand what the page is about). Around 5 to 8 per cent is a rough guide as to the optimal level. Don't overdo it, otherwise it will be seen as spam or keyword-stuffing. Also use your keywords in the headings tags H1 and H2. There is an H3 tag as well, but it is doubtful whether search engines bother with that, as it is perceived as less prominent on the page, therefore less relevant to what the page is about.

6. Don't forget good linking in your website marketing. Search engines will judge the importance of your web pages to some extent on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. Ask other webmasters with sites on similar themes to yours for a link, in exchange for a link back. These sites should not be in competition with yours, but should be similarly themed. You may occasionally be asked by other webmasters if they can link to your site. If this is so then have a look at their site; make sure that their site is relevant, that it has at least some Page Rank, and that it just "feels" good, and has no nasty surprises like redirects or unexpected popups. You don't want to be associated with a "bad neighborhood"!

7. Make sure that important keywords are included in the anchor text within inbound links from other sites. This is crucial to search engines when they try to figure out the relevance and importance of your pages. The inbound link from the other site should take the form of something like this (I'm using normal brackets instead of angle brackets so as not to use compromising html): (A HREF="http://www.Yoursite.com") your important keywords included here(/A). You should definitely avoid something like (A HREF="http://www.Yoursite.com")click here(/A), which tells search engines nothing except that your site is about "click here". Be careful!

With the millions and millions of websites in existence today, how do you get yours noticed? The most common way is for it to be high up in the rankings of useful and relevant websites. Google is the most widely used search engine today. When someone keys in a search term on Google, you can only hope that your website comes up in the first ten pages of results. You do not have to sit there and just hope, though. There are a number of things you could do to improve your chances of being noticed.

Google came up with a system to determine how important a website is. Everyday, Google's automated programs called spiders "crawl" the World Wide Web. The purpose is to index all the existing web pages out there. The information these spiders gather is used as the basis for calculating what Google calls PageRank. This concept was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Stanford University.

What exactly is PageRank? It is an algorithm which assigns numerical weights to linked pages. The higher the figures, the more important the page is. The PageRank is resultant of how many pages link to your own page. It is of no use to make bogus incoming links to your page though. Google gives more weight to more reputable sites that link to your page. Bogus and paid incoming links can actually be detected. The algorithm takes into account all incoming links - both external and internal.

This is where sitemaps come into the picture. As can be gathered from the name, sitemaps are basically a guide to what can be found in your website. It is a page within your site wherein the user can see the overall structure and informational content. It contains links to all the pages in your website.

Will providing a sitemap increase your Google PageRank? The answer is simple: yes it may. As mentioned earlier, the PageRank system also takes into account internal links. The more pages you have in your website, the higher you PageRank. A word of caution is necessary here. Pages should contain original content and not simply be copies of each other. Otherwise, your PageRank may actually decrease. As the spiders follow links to get to web pages, a sitemap will actually facilitate the "travel" of these spiders within your site. If each of the pages on your web site are interconnected and are easily accessible from one page, then chances are the spiders will find the necessary information faster and easier. Experts suggest that you put only a maximum of 100 links in one page. If you have more than that number of links, you should create different sets of sitemaps. In order for the idea of the sitemap to really work, you need to provide a link to the sitemap on every page on your website.

The keys to increasing your PageRank are fairly simple. Include original content in as many pages as you can. Link your pages together. Create a sitemap to make navigation easier. Provide links to the sitemap for each page. This way, both user and spiders can find all the information that you have to offer.

The purpose of search engine optimization is to bring success to a website. Is it still possible to gain impressive site traffic and rank when almost all webmasters use the same web marketing techniques and strategies? The internet world calls for uniqueness and originality. This is what you are supposed to give it. But with the ever changing demands of the search engines, would there still be a painless SEO?

The Search Engine Craze

Search engine optimization is beneficial to most websites. It was even believed to be the ultimate key to the highest ranking on the search engine result pages. Search engine optimization was a painless task before. All you need are keywords incorporated on the Meta tags of your website and then you can rightly expect to be at the top of the search engine result pages!

However the search engines have changed their craze. It does this often especially when it comes to determining whether what site to place on the top of the SERPs. The Meta tags that once used to be the key for higher ranking have lost its charisma to the search engines. The trend has given favor to the doorway pages.

And then the search engines are not yet satisfied, they change their trend again. This time the demand was converted to links - more specifically incoming or inbound links. The more incoming links your site has, the more important your website appears on the eyes of the search engines. Webmasters began soliciting links because they are important for their website\'s ranking. Along with the incoming links is the trend for paid links and ads.

Is There Still A Room for Painless SEO in the Internet?

With all these changes in the search engines craze and with all these unending cycle of trends in determining a website's importance, can we still expect for a painless search engine optimization for our websites? Search engine optimization still does work! And good news to all webmasters, SEO can still be a painless task. The key to painless SEO lies on the capability of the webmasters to balance all elements that are considered relevant by the search engines.

Don't you think it is time that we think of improving our site naturally than following every trend of the search engines? It will be a painful task to follow every change of the search engines. Getting a higher rank for your website is as simple as making your website relevant and legitimate.

The internet competition requires you to update your website continuously to maintain its importance and originality. SEO is also as simple as balancing the keywords of your website. Moreover, search engine optimization is about relevant content. Don't mind the change of trends of the search engines. As long as your website has relevant content, it won't be affected much by the changes!

What kind of Internet users may not be aware that every time they enter a keyword search term into a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, there are hundreds of thousands of websites in competition for this keyword phrase. It is absolutely essential to do everything possible to web pages within the top twenty-20 results, this is the first 2 pages, from the search engines as a general rule of thumb are 10 sites on each side by search engines. Internet users may not be aware of it, but every time they are on the results page, after the implementation of a Web search, they show a tendency to visit the sites listed in the first two pages.

Because users transport is essential for the success of a website, many website owners and web development specialists, are serious about business via the Internet will do everything they can do to top rankings in search engines. The most effective strategy for achieving this is through the submission of the site search engine optimization (SEO) and the rule of setting the SEO firm to do the SEO service for them.

How does an SEO firm implementation of the SEO services it offers? SEO services are always two-fold, and these two sides always go hand in hand. One side is the SEO side, while the other deals with the off-page SEO.

When we speak of on-page SEO services, we are talking about how a SEO firm would optimize the content of the site itself. The article on the site in a manner that the relevant keywords to what the site. The key words are also embedded in the ALT tags and the meta tags used coding of the site. Keywords are important, because these are among the components that search engines are looking for when they read a website.

Off-Page is part of SEO services and called on the other side sea of website as with link building. Search engines also assess how relevant a site is limited to certain number of key words, a user on the links to a Web page contains in relation to the keywords, and the quality of these links. To achieve this, SEO companies work on the link construction and exchanges link to sites which they develop.

Because of the tightness of the competition on the Internet for top search engine rankings, SEO services are in demand and run a business SEO turns as a very lucrative business.

SEO a Company can easily top ranking promise for a client, the Web site, the question is:

Would the SEO firm in a position to implement it? A website owner should always be careful in picking a SEO company, the implementation of the SEO services that they need. Track record and reliability are the necessary qualities to all SEO companies. Choosing the right SEO firm to carry out the necessary SEO services can make or break the success of a website.