The Basics

Search Engine Tactics (v. 1.93):
The Basics

Why worry about search engine positioning? It's the holy grail of every webmaster out there. You hear everyone talking about it.

What's the big deal?

Quite simply, if your site comes up in the first ten results of a search, your chances of being viewed are increased dramatically.

The idea here is simple. When someone types in a keyword related to my website, I want my site to come up before all others. Yes, the idea is simple but making this happen can be quite difficult.

In this "e-book" you will find a concise distillation of the best techniques available and some good old-fashioned common sense. You need to realize in the beginning that there is no 100% solution here. You will never be able to come up first on every search engine all the time. All you can do is use the techniques that work from the outset and then modify as you discover what works.

What works? That is what we'll show you here.

(Now, if you the easy way out (it can get tricky and frustrating), but still want to get a high ranking, check out SearchHound. They will let you bid for a guaranteed high ranking for the keyword of your choice. And you only pay by the click, so it's a really good deal.)

Before we begin, here are some useful definitions that will help you understand this discussion and your internet experience better:

Search Engine: A site that indexes World Wide Web pages based on content. Each engine works differently. They may base the results of their searches on Meta Tags, page content, page title, or a combination of these. The search engines get their content from spider (see below) programs. Some popular search engines are Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos. (SearchHound is the newest and coolest of all. It allows you to search 24 engines at once- including its own superb index. Also, when you submit there, you can automatically submit to many other sites for free. It is the place to start.) Contrast this with a "Directory".
Directory: A site that categorizes the World Wide Web based on input submitted by someone. A good example of this is Yahoo. In this case, the actual web content is never accessed. When someone searches for a keyword, this is referenced against a database of sites that contain a title and description for a particular site. Once again, this site is categorized by topic and the title and description are submitted by someone.
Spider: A program used by a search engine to index the World Wide Web content. Spiders are all set differently, but they all capture specific information about a page. Some capture the title and the first 1,000 characters of content. Some capture the title and "description" Meta Tag. Some look only for the "keyword" meta tag. Some use a combination of all of these methods.
Hit: Any time a document is accessed from a web site. If someone tells you they get 1,000 hits a day at their site, this may not be a big deal. For instance, if they have 15 images on their page each time their page is accessed it generates 16 hits (once for each image and once for the HTML document). Ask them how they got this information and you'll get a better idea about what they mean by the statement. This information is generally useless for our purposes. It usually doesn't matter how many times a particular graphic is used.
User Session: Any time a single user logs on to a site. He can look at all the pages of the site, but it still equals only one user session.
Page View: Any time a viewer looks at a particular page. This is more meaningful than a hit.
Access Logs (Server Logs): Most web servers maintain access logs. This log will contain information about which pages have been viewed how many times, what page referred the web surfer to your page, what time they came in, any errors encountered if any. Ask your ISP to set this up on your site. Most good web hosting services will offer some form of statistical analysis.

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