Today we are discussing SEO as so many sites out there neglect their SEO which is almost as essential to marketing online as having content. We will be discussing basics, so if you are more advanced feel free to comment on your personal experiences or advice:

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Essential to your websites growth and development on the internet. Not having SEO will not physically hurt your business as it resides on the internet, however it will hurt additional business and free traffic that is out there for your website.



A perfect website is a website that is #1 ranked in every search engine for all its strategic keywords. There are a ton of #1 spots and a ton of search engines, but everyday someone else is number 1. In order to maintain your keywords, you must have goals of keywords you are targeting and consistently adapt to stay ahead of your competitions.
You will have to consistently adapt and look at each search term individually if you are going to be ranked #1 on all of them.

Basic SEO all depends on:

1.) Site Name
2.) Site Architecture
3.) Page Construction
4.) Keyword Rich text Content
5.) Link popularity
6.) Web Server Configuration

This week we are going to start with Number 1:

Site Name:

A site name is only as strong as the content it has on the page to back it up. In the past when dealing with Search engines you are dealing with in the most part intelligent robots, not people. Now a days most search engine companies have consolidated and you have human eyes examining a lot of the larger search terms.

It's important that your page not only have the right name, but the name must match the product.

Once your site name and product you offer on your site match, the next step is targeting the key words you want to represent your site. Your keywords determine what customers see your site and will dictate what your content embodies.

Once you've found your key words you'd like your site to identify with you can then begin the process of SEO.

First step is to ensure that robots are actually spidering your site from the search engines, this is very simple and it's done thru:
Robots.txt files:

They tell the search engine to crawl or search your site.
For the Robot.txt files you can allow and disallow certain things. They typically contain two fields, the User-agent line and the Disallow line.

Example: The (*) is the symbol for all.
User-agent:*
Disallow:/hotmoms/girls/lexilove.html etc

As you go you can disallow certain spiders from crawling your sites.
These are the recommended spiders that should be allowed:

Slurp - Inktomi (Yahoo)
MSNBot - MSN
Googlebot - Google
FAST - WebCrawler All the Web
IA Archiver - Alexa
AskJeeves
WISENutbot
Gigabot - Gigablast

So doing the * allows all the search engines to spider the site, but if you want to block bots that you see are affecting your bandwidth or some bot you don't know that is taking information from your site, just put this:

Example:
User-Agent: "rogue-bot-name"
Dissallow:/

That is one of the firs steps in SEO, we will be discussing more on next weeky and getting into Meta Tags.

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Just trying to show you it can be done