SEO
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Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the single most important effort in promoting your website content. SEO can significantly increase your website traffic by helpng to gain favorable representation on search engines. You can either hire a search engine optimization expert or try and do it yoursef.
Good SEO experts cost fair amounts of money and since this site is about making money online with minimal investment this section is devoted to how to optimize your website for search engines yourself.
Search engine optimization is not something you do after you have already created a website. Re-doing something is always harder than doing it right from the beginning. You should build your website content already with SEO techniques in mind.
About search engines
I believe it is safe to say that search engines are the single most valuable source of free internet traffic. Search engines use your site as their content (well, not your website particularly but most sites on the world wide web) for people who are looking for something you have to offer.
As you remember, relevant traffic is what represents most value, so search engines develop what's called a search algorithms, which helps to determine how much a certain site (or rather individual page) is related to what a person was looking for.
The science or rather art of search engine optimization is to make sure that what your site has to offer is well represented in search engine results when people are looking for what your site has to offer. There are several main search engines. I will list them in the order of importance as perceived by myself – Google, Yahoo, MSN and then some regional/national search engines.
How search engines work
Search engines pay attention to two categories of factors to rank a website - on-site factors and off-site factors. The first is content on your website, something that is completely in your control. The second, is something that you don't have direct control of - information about your site on other sites, which basically boils down to external links (hypertext) discussed earlier.
Although search algorithms constantly change, there are still some differences as to how much importance they put on each different factor. Google is known to waive more importance on off-page factors. Yahoo and MSN, especially MSN pay more attention to the on-page factors.
In a way off-page factors are more reliable to ensure that the site is relevant to keywords and really offers the valuable content for the keywords as on-page factor are quite easy to manipulate and irresponsible webmasters use them in a bad manner. Back in the days, webmasters used to abuse the techniques to artificially increase relevance of their website (e.g. by flooding the pages with keywords). I would definitely not advise to do that as first of all I believe in providing valuable content and second, modern search engine algorithms pick it up very easily and will on the contrary decrease your ratings or blacklist a site that uses them.
Anyway, back to the chase, the next section will discuss how to optimize a website for search engines.
Optimizing for search engines
I divide search engine optimization into two distict parts, both of equal importance as doing one without the other will void your optimization efforts.
The first part is selecting keywords that you are planning to target. The second is achieing high ranking for your website (get good search engine position) on those keywords.
The following section of this website talks about these search engine optimization techniques in detail.