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Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 2
Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
Table of Contents Introduction: How Web Copywriting Differs From Traditional Copywriting………………………………………………………………44
The Plan: Knowing What Your Visitors Want to Find………………..46
Discover Your USP………………………………………………………48
What's the Importance of Keywords……………………………………49
How to Use Keywords to Attract the Search Engines…………………50
Should you Keep Your Copywriting Short and Sweet?.........................51
What Makes Web Copywriting Great………………………………….54
How to Writer a Killer Headline………………………………………..55
Test Your Headlines to See What Converts the Best…………………..57
Master the Art of Bullet Points………………………………………….57
Power Words to Infuse Your Copywriting……………………………..60
Power Transitions to Keep Your Visitor Reading……………………..61
The Copywriting Secrets They Don't Want You To Know …………...67
Conclusion………………………………………………………………...69
Special Note: At many places in the text, you will see the terms “search engine theory” and “how do search engines work?” I use these terms as general catch-all phrases having to do with SEO, Search Engine Optimization.
The subject may be a bit hard to get your head around so I thought this might make it easier for you. The term “SE” stands for Search Engines.
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Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
Introduction To Search Engine Optimization Starting to explore the search engine theory
Creating and publishing a website is no longer a mysterious, cryptic task that is reserved only for computer geeks. Nowadays, virtually everyone and their dog has their own website. Anyone wanting a piece of the virtual pie can easily sign up for a free Blogger blog in about five minutes. In addition, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors available that make creating a beautiful, interactive website a very simple drag & drop process.
So that's the easy part. The difficulty lies in getting your website seen! With the internet's estimated 20 billion webpages, how on earth can you attempt to rise above obscurity and become well-known and famous in your niche?
How Do Search Engines Work? The answer lies in search engine optimization and understanding the search engine theory of operation. Search engine optimization can be defined as the process of driving traffic to your website organically (unpaid) from the search engines. In order to get the search engine bots to notice your site and include it in the results pages, you'll need to work on these three components:
1. Making sure your content is relevant to the keyword phrases being searched
2. Optimizing your website with keywords and linking structures Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 4
Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
3. Building powerful inbound links to your website from others in your niche How Do Search Engines Work? If you want massive exposure for your website, you need it to rank on the first page of Google for several different keyword phrases. 90% of internet users do not browse beyond the first page of results, so don't settle for being on the second or third page and only getting a tiny sliver of the traffic that you could be getting. Learn to use the best of the
website building programs to ensure success.
It will teach you the ins and outs of search engine theory and how it is the glue that holds all this together.
Unfortunately, no one makes it to the #1 spot on Google overnight (unless there happens to be no competition whatsoever – which is highly unlikely for any keyword phrase that gets a decent amount of searches). Unlike “instant” methods like PPC (pay per click), search engine optimization takes a lot of time and effort. Think of PPC as the hustle and bustle of the big city. Search engine optimization, on the other hand, is like a rural Southern town where progress moves slow and steady like molasses.
Marketers who choose to focus on search engine theory rather than driving traffic through PPC or other means acknowledge the fact that it takes time. If you are impatient or give up easily, perhaps search engine optimization may not be the right method for you to drive traffic to your website. No worries!
But for those of you that want to learn the answer to how do search engines work?, read on. The fundamentals are really quite simple. The first step is Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 5
Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
learning. The second step is implementing. If you can do those two things, you've got it made!
How Do The Engines Work?
You see it and use it multiple times throughout the day, but do you know how it works?
Surprisingly, many webmasters severely lack knowledge about one of the most Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 6
Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
important aspects of the internet search engine theory! We all know SE’s exist, we know people use them, and we know that they drive traffic to our websites. But many people would be hard pressed to answer the question: how do search engines work? If you can educate yourself about the search engine theory, you'll be capable of optimizing your site properly and internet success is not far away.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Search engines send automated "bots" to "crawl" the web through hyperlinks.
As we'll discuss later, without external hyperlinks to your website, the bots really have no way of finding your website. It's still possible that they'll discover your site eventually, but without some kind of effort on your part, it may be unlikely.
Only about half of the existing pages on the internet have been crawled, if that gives you any indication of the importance of backlinks.
Once the bots crawl your website, it becomes indexed in a huge database along with all the other indexed pages on the internet. There are literally billions of pages stored in this database. Yet, as you've probably noticed, it takes barely a second or two to get results after performing a search.
When searches are made, the engine quickly scans through relevant Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 7
Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
documents and provides results based on the most accurate possible matches.
Generally a match is determined by the presence of that particular keyword on the webpage. Thus, on-page optimization is extremely important. It is the basis for the search engine theory. Quality, relevant content is the name of the game.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Google and the other search engines will provide differing results depending on whether you type the phrase as-is (purple umbrellas), in quotes ("purple umbrellas"), with the + symbol (purple + umbrellas), or other variations.
After the SE has found matches for the search query, a special algorithm scans each of the results to determine relevance to the keyword phrase. Results are provided to the user in order from most relevant to least relevant.
So what can you learn from this information? A few things: 1. Your page must be relevant to the search term (listing the keyword several times throughout the course of the website, on-site search engine optimization)
2. You need external hyperlinks (backlinks) pointing to your website to act as a “gateway” for the bots to access your site. This is another mainstay of the search engine theory.
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Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
How do search engines work? As far as relevance goes, Google and the other engines take all of the following into consideration: 1. On-site optimization
2. Age of the domain (the older the better)
3. Page Rank (PR)
4. Alexa ranking (the 'popularity' of your website based on the amount of traffic it gets)
5. Number of backlinks, particularly from high PR authority websites that are related to your website (if you have a blog about real estate, a high PR link from a real estate website will be more valuable than a high PR
link from a website about dog grooming)
6. Linking structure of the website (easy navigation) So looking at all of these factors, you can see why Amazon.com would take the
#1 spot for “buy books” rather than your three-week-old Blogger blog with 4
backlinks.
Stumbling Blocks For The Engines
More search engine theory: Sometimes the SE’s are prevented from crawling your website for one reason or another. You'll want to make sure you eliminate these.
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Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
1. Your site requires a cookie for navigation. Bots can't carry cookies the way a regular browser user can.
2. Framed websites. Back in the day (10+ years ago) when I first started designing & programming websites, I loved using frames. But I had no idea that it would hinder my sites' ability to be ranked in the search engines.
3. Long, complicated URLs such as website.com/page.php?ID=HuUj=987sj=%site%
4. Login pages
5. Redirect pages (Google hates these)
6. Poor linking structure on your website. Each page on your domain should be linked to from the home page (or a sitemap) or the bots may have a difficult time crawling it (because they won't be able to find it). Ideally, you would like to have a very convenient linking structure, in which each page on your domain is accessible from every other page. This is why Wordpress blogs fit so nicely into the search engine theory of how they look at things. It is because their layout allows for this kind of linking structure.
7. You accidentally have the “I would like to block SE’s” option selected in the “Privacy” tab in your Wordpress dashboard. Sometimes this option is selected automatically, so always double-check that it is turned off.
Similar options exist for other sites like Blogger.
You have a robots.txt file preventing the spiders from crawling certain pages thus stopping the process of how do search engines work?
8. Usually this is done purposefully to prevent unwanted content from being indexed, but sometimes it might be a mistake.
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Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
9. Your page is heavily coded with Javascript or contains Flash as its primary method of delivering content.
Keyword Research’s Job In The Search Engine Theory If you want your website to rank in the search engines, you'll need to optimize it for particular keyword phrases. Keyword research is the process of finding out which keywords will be the easiest and most beneficial to optimize for.
Generally, you'll be looking at two things:
1. Search volume: How many people search for the keyword in a given month.
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2. Competition: How many competing websites are also optimized for this keyword phrase.
Why is keyword research important? Well, you can't just pick some keywords and keyword phrases off the top of your head and expect to easily rank for them. If your website is just getting off the ground, you will find it exceptionally difficult to rank for a keyword like “lose weight” or “quit smoking” or even “cat litter”.
However, if you conduct proper keyword research, you may be able to find similar keyword phrases that have a decent search volume and little competition. Those are the keywords that you want to target. These will allow you to make home online incomes.
I could go on and on for one hundred pages about keyword research, but I know you have a busy schedule, so I'm just going to get straight to the point.
To easily conduct keyword research (for free), all you need are two resources at your disposal: The Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and the Google search engine itself. These are powerful muscles for the search engine theory.
An excellent explanation of all this can be read at affiliate work from home
Open up the Keyword Tool and input your desired keywords. How do you know which keywords to list? Well, let's say you have a website about jewelry. The keyword phrases you choose could be:
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buy homemade jewelry
buy homemade necklaces
buy homemade earrings
online jewelry store
Basically, anything related to the content of your website. Generally, the more targeted your keywords are, the better. So if you specialize in turquoise jewelry only, don't bother optimizing for “jewelry” (an exceptionally hard keyword to rank for) – just “turquoise jewelry”.
Additionally, don't try to rank for “pearl jewelry” if that's not what your website covers. You want to attract visitors who are specifically looking for
“turquoise jewelry” – they will come to your website and see that you are offering them exactly what they are looking for. The overall quality of your traffic will be better and your conversions will be higher.
Click “Get keyword ideas” and you'll be given a long list of related keyword phrases and their search numbers.
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Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
Browse through the keyword list and copy down all the keyword phrases that interest you. Generally it's safe to assume that the higher the search volume, the higher the competition, and vice versa. However, this isn't always the case. It's still possible to stumble upon some real gems – keywords with high search volume and little competition.
How Do Search Engines Work?
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Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
Let's take a look at this keyword: discount jewelry store. As you can see, it gets 1600 searches per month.
Now go to Google and type it in with quotes, like this: “discount jewelry store”
The quotes tell Google to only show websites that are optimized for the entire keyword phrase, in order. Without quotes, Google searches for all websites that contain the words discount, jewelry, and store, but not necessarily together, and not necessarily in order. So keeping the phrase in quotes is important because it'll give you a more accurate idea of the competition.
As you can see, Google tells us that there are 19,600 competing websites for Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 15
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this keyword phrase. Generally anything under 50,000 is considered pretty good. The lower the better in search engine theory.
Another search you can do is allintitle: “discount jewelry store” and allinanchor: “discount jewelry store”.
The first tells you how many websites are optimized with the keyword phrase in the title and the second tells you how many contain the keyword as anchor text in a link. This, in a sense, is your “true” competition, because these people purposely optimizing for your keyword.
Finally, it's important to look at the specific pages that turn up in the top 10 –
20 results. Check their Page Rank. You can download a free plugin for Firefox called “Seo For Firefox”. There will be a tiny icon at the bottom of your browser that will tell you the PR of any website you're browsing.
It's also important to see what KIND of pages show up in the results. Are they high authority domain names like Amazon, Ebay, etc?
The best way to tell if a keyword will be easy to rank for is to look for Web 2.0
sites, social bookmarks, and RSS feeds in the top 10. Ezinearticles, GoArticles, Weebly, Squidoo, Hubpages, Livejournal, Wordpress, Blogger, and Quizilla are all examples of Web 2.0 sites which are relatively recent additions to the tools of the search engine theory.
Furthermore, keep an eye out for results like this: Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 16
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This is a page from a social bookmarking website. Other sites like this include Mixx, Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and delicious. Also look for Yahoo! Answers and Youtube videos.
If your search (without quotes) looks something like the screenshot below, you've probably found a winner. It doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have to work hard or face challenges, but it's certainly a lot easier to beat these types of websites than it is to beat high authority aged domain names with lots of backlinks.
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Search Engine Theory and How Do Search Engines Work?
So there you have it: a very very BASIC guide to keyword research and competition analysis. Once you've found a suitable keyword or keywords, you'll be ready to perform some on-site optimization.
On-Site Optimization
The process of on-site optimization is quite simple. By following these easy steps, you'll be vastly improving your website's SE friendliness and search engine theory propagation.
Just remember: on-site optimization is important, but don't go overboard. You Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 18
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still want your website to be attractive and comprehensible to actual human visitors. If you go crazy with optimization, try to unnaturally place keywords in sentences where they don't belong, and generally compromise the quality of your site just to look good in search engine theory, you'll be making a huge mistake.
It doesn't matter if you rank on page 1 and get 800 visitors a day. If your visitors can't read your website and don't enjoy the experience, all of that traffic will ultimately mean nothing.
But I digress...
How Do Search Engines Work?
You want your keyword(s) to appear:
In the Title
A good title might be: “Discount Jewelry Store – Discount Turquoise Jewelry, Discount Gold Jewelry”. You have your “main” keyword phrase first, followed by a couple secondary keyword phrases. If this page shows up in the results, the keyword that the person searched for will be in bold. Additionally, if you are trying to rank a “deep page” (as in, not the main page) include your main keyword in that title as well (“Best Discount Jewelry Prices – Discount Jewelry Store”).
Make sure the titles for each of your pages are unique and relevant to the Search Engine Optimization and All About Search Engines 19
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content being displayed. Avoid extremely long titles, as Google will cut them off. Avoid “keyword stuffing” as well – jamming as many keywords as possible into the title. Google may categorize your site as spam.
In the Body According to the search engine theory: The keywords need to appear in the body of your website several times. This is often referred to as “keyword density”. A good keyword density to aim for is 2-3%. Less than that may not be enough, more than that may be treading on spammy ground.
One great free tool you can use is DupeFreePro. Simply copy and paste all the text on your website into this program and it'll tell you exactly what your keyword density is. You can also use it to check for duplicate content, hence the name.
Include your keyword at least 3-4 times throughout the actual content – once in the first sentence if possible, a couple times throughout the paragraphs, and once in the last sentence. Emphasizing the keyword through bolding or italicizing may be a good idea. Include your keyword in the H1 tags as well, and at least once in the anchor text of a link.
In the “Title” attribute of Images
Search engine theory regarding images: If you have images on your website, adding your keyword to the Title attribute may help your images rank in the Google Image search.
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<img src=”jewelry.jpg” title=”Discount Jewelry Store”> In the Domain Name I would highly recommend including your primary keyword in your domain name, if you haven't already purchased one. Google places a lot of importance on domain names with keywords in them.
Of course, it may not be possible to purchase a .com domain with the keyword of your choice. Check for the .net and .org alternatives, or you could put a dash in between the words of your keyword phrase. Limit it to only one or two dashes, however. Any more than that and your domain name could look spammy.
Another option is adding a prefix or a suffix. Generally suffixes are preferred because you want your keyword to be first. So instead of www.keyword.ca, you could make it www.keywordblog.cca, www.keywordsite.cca, www.keywordstore.cca, etc.
As far as prefixes go, many webmasters like to add “my” or “the” to their domain name, like www.mydiscountjewelrystore.cca.
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