Many people are confused as to why SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is considered an internet marketing strategy. The reason for this is really very simple. Traffic among the search engines is free and as your rank rises within the engines you get continual link requests from webmasters. In turn, this gives you another source of traffic that does not cost you a penny. For most internet marketers, traffic is their main concern and priority. Without traffic, online businesses will go nowhere and are doomed to failure.
Everyone wants their site to be rated higher among the search engines. The best approach is to learn how to maintain your search engine optimization by yourself and avoid wasting money paying someone else to do it for you. It is fairly easy to learn how to properly optimize your site for the search engines.
However, there is time and effort that are required to do this. Keep in mind that there is a significant difference between an index and directory. Indexes are maintained by what are known as “spiders” that crawl all webpages on a consistent basis and index sites based on a very complicated set of factors. Where your site is listed in the index listings is dependent on your score according to the formulas that the search engines are using. To get listed in an index, you either submit your URL and wait until the spider crawls your site or the spider finds your site indirectly through your incoming links.
It will be important to learn about all of the different search engines, indexes, and directories. However, before you dive into these, you need to first understand Meta Tags. Meta Tags exist within HTML codes and are found at the very top of a webpage. Title tag, description, and keyword tags are the most important and vital to your success. In the last few years, spiders have started indexing website pages based on lists of keywords that are provided by the site creators. When this happened, webmasters started trying to cheat their way to higher rankings by stuffing their sites with irrelevant keywords. Since that time search engines started changing and redoing their indexing system to combat this.
Now, only Title and Description Meta Tags are looked at with importance. This has lead to search engine indexing becoming much more complex. Now, the focus is on evaluating website content instead of single page content. This means that webmasters now have to structure their pages appropriately to get the spiders to find them relevant to the keywords that they are using.
Directories, on the other hand, are a simple list of sites that are divided up into categories. To get listed in a directory, all you have to do is submit your site description and wait for the editors to approve it. Keep in mind that most directories organize their listings alphabetically within categories. This is important to keep in mind when deciding on your URL or website name.
Regardless of how you go about getting your site seen, whether through indexing or directories, it is important to spend some time planning and doing research. Make sure that you learn all that you can and that you are utilizing search engine ranking to the full potential and reaping the benefits from it.