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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is defined as (in my own words):

“The process of finding out the best keywords for a web site and by the use of optimizing the web site along with other off-page work making that web site attain a higher position in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for those selected words.”

Although the exact calculations used by the search engines are kept secret, there is lot of knowledge and observations in this field from thousands of webmasters worldwide.

It could be said to be a branch of online marketing. In general terms you can say that it means to make a web site more visible and make it look important in the eyes of search engines.

Not being familiar with SEO and not applying it compared to actually doing the right things can make a huge difference in terms of visitors to your web site.

Just about anybody can create a presence on the Internet. Building a web site can be as simple as using a word processor, but once you have the site you need a way to publish it on the World Wide Web. This is where web-hosting companies come in.

A web host rents you disk space and provides all the services necessary for others to see your web site on the Internet.  Barring technical problems, a web host operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so that anybody in the world can access your web site at any time.

There are literally thousands of web hosts to choose from so choosing an appropriate host can be a difficult task. The prices range from free to hundreds of dollars a year. Hosting companies can offer a multitude of services that can be confusing to a newcomer. This series of articles will help you to sort out all the information available and give you the confidence to make the proper decision about choosing a web host.

Free or Paid?

There are plenty of hosting companies that provide free hosting, so why bother paying for it?  The old adage ‘You get what you pay for’ is just as valid in the electronic age as it was 100 years ago. In web hosting, when you pay nothing you sometimes end up with nothing.

Most free web hosts offer limited services. Even though they are not charging you to host your website, they still need to make money. They often do this by placing advertising on your site. You probably won’t have any control over what kind of ads show up – it’s a matter of take it or leave it.

In addition, free hosts may restrict the content you place on your site. You may not be allowed to sell things or have certain content such as videos or music. Finally, your web site could simply disappear overnight. New companies that offer free hosting pop up almost everyday, but they also vanish with astonishing regularity. When your hosting company vanishes, your web site goes with it.

If you are serious about having a web site you need to use a reliable web host. Prices range considerably – some companies offer rates as low as $2 a month while others charge $60 or more. Be careful, though. High rates don’t always translate as high service. Some of the lower priced hosts offer reliable, stable environments that allow your website to be accessed day in day out for years.

Generally speaking the more you pay the more you get. Higher rates should bring you more storage space, more bandwidth to handle Internet traffic, and more services such as databases, email accounts, mass mailers, and the ability to add custom scripts. Higher rates can also mean better technical service if you have problems with your website.

What is a Web Server?

Whichever hosting company you choose, it helps to understand some of the technical details about their service. Every host has dedicated computers called servers which connect to the Internet and ’serve’ pages when they are requested.  That is, whenever anyone wants to see a certain web page by clicking on a link the request is sent to the particular server where that web page is stored. The server responds by sending HTML data across the Internet. A web server must have fast connections to be able to serve pages quickly. For the greatest speed and reliability try to find a host that has multiple high-speed connections as well as reliable back up power supplies in case of power outages.

* AOL Search - A Google powered search engine used by AOL users also pulls listings from the Open Directory Project.
* AltaVista - the Internet’s first Web Index, has very comprehensive coverage and a wide range of power searching commands, which make it a particular favorite among researchers. It gets its listings from Yahoo! Search.
* All The Web - uses results from Yahoo! Search plus an index of tens of millions of pdf and doc files.
* Ask.com - (formerly Ask Jeeves) is a human-powered search service that attempts to direct you to the exact page that answers your question. If it fails to find a match within its own database, then it will provide web pages from their search engine.
* Excite - A popular web portal (a page that, in addition to search, includes news, sports, weather, email and much more) on the web. Excite uses a metasearch engine that searches Google, Yahoo and Ask listings.
* Google - Currently the most popular search engine, makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites. This can be especially helpful in finding good sites in response to general searches such as “cars” and “travel,” because users across the web have in essence voted for good sites by linking to them.
Google is also known for a wide range of features including: cached pages, excellent spell checking, access to dictionary definitions, stock quotes, street maps, telephone numbers and more. The Google Toolbar is also very popular.
* HotBot - has advanced search features and presents listings from either Ask.com or MSN and the Open Directory Project
* LookSmart includes past and popular searches right on their home page. They also have a pay per click advertising program.
* Lycos - another web portal offers “personalized content” including free email, websites, blogs and photo sharing. They include listings from the Open Directory Project. A good looking site.
* MSN Search - Microsoft’s MSN web portal also offers free email, instant messenger, and a directory. It previously used Looksmart for its search results but now provides access to Yahoo’s listings.
* Netscape Search - Netscape Search’s results come primarily from Google and the Open Directory Project.
* Open Directory Project - Uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. It was acquired by Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. Netscape itself was the first licensee. Lycos also uses the information for its main service and within Lycos-owned HotBot. Here’s more information about Open Directory.
* Search.com - A metasearch engine owned by CNET, that searches Google, Ask.com, LookSmart and dozens of other leading search engines to bring you the best results.
* Snap - An innovative search company that offers previews of websites in search listings.
* WebCrawler is a metasearch engine that combines results from Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com. They also offer a toolbar with Dictionary Search that you can download.
* Yahoo! Search - Once the web’s most popular search service is still a good alternative to Google. Yahoo is the oldest major web site directory, having launched in late 1994.

Website linking structure and number of links pointing to your site or page is crucial to ranking High in Google and if you rank good in Google, chances are you’ll do good in Yahoo and other search engines but top 3 search engines that will bring most traffic are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Analyzing your competitors is important and included in Free SEO tips because search engines do analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria which is called Page Rank (PR).

So what other websites are doing to rank on top of search results. In order to find out you need to gather a significant amount of data about the top ranking sites for whatever keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize your page for, like:

1. Competition’s rank in the Search Engines Results for given keyword
2. The number of incoming links to the site’s home page, not including

internal links.
3. What keywords they use in the title tag
4. Number of links containing keywords in the link text
5. PageRank of linking pages
6. The Alexa traffic ranking

Most of this information can be collected free by querying Google and Yahoo (Read about it in this Analyzing Individual Keyword Phrase article) and using free seo tools but it is very time consuming and you can’t get all data in one place.

I use This SEO Tool that can easily crawl a Web site and compile statistics on keyword usage throughout the site with single click of a mouse and all data is displayed in one window.

Frames can either compliment a web site or make it look unprofessional.

If you must use frames, use them sparingly. If not used properly, frames can make your content very difficult to view.

Avoid making your visitors have to scroll from side to side to view your content. This can be very irritating and cause your visitors to leave and never return.

Consider using small borderless frames at the top or bottom of your page that blend in with the rest of your web site.

In addition, try to only use a couple of framesets. A web site divided up into several frames not only looks bad, but is also very difficult to view and navigate.

In addition, web sites using frames are very difficult for the Search Engines to index.

If you must use frames, offer your visitors a choice — Frames verses no frames.

When linking to a web address that isn’t a part of your web site, open the web site in a new window. Your web site will remain open in the original window and prevent you from completely losing your visitors.

To open a web page in a new window, add the following code to your link.

<A HREF=”http://www.yourdomain.com/” TARGET=”_blank”>Your Link</a>

The ANCHOR tag is used to create a hyperlink within a web page.

To link to a web page within the same directory of your web site, you only need to include the page name within your HTML code.

<A HREF=”yourpage.html”>Text</A>

When linking to a web page within your web site in a different directory, you must include the directory name with your page name.

<A HREF=”yourdirectory/yourpage.html”>Text</A>

When linking to another web site, you must include the full URL.

<A HREF=”http://www.site.com”>Text</A>

Web site traffic is the number one imperative of 99-percent of the marketers on the Internet. How does one go about gaining more web site traffic? That is putting the cart before the horse. The first thing a person needs to do is measure current web site traffic before embarking on gaining more traffic. The second step is to use some or all of the methods listed below to gain more web site traffic and the third step is to measure current hits once again in order to calculate the success of the traffic-building campaign.

Measuring Web Site Traffic

You may know where you want to go, but how do you get there if you don’t know where you’re starting from? By measuring current web site traffic, you’ll establish a baseline of how many hits you’re currently receiving and where they’re coming from.

If someone else is hosting your site, most likely they’ll have a traffic analysis package that you can access through the control panel. Packages such as Webalizer or AW Stats are common. Even if one of these web site traffic analysis applications is not offered by your host, most likely you’ll still have access to the log files and can download these to a PC and use an application such as Funny Web Analyzer to give out the necessary stats.

If these web site traffic analysis packages are not available or understandable, you may wish to turn to an outside vendor who will give you a little Java code to put on the pages in order to give the necessary stats. Vendors like web-stats.com or freestats.com are a couple of places to start.

Once you have an idea of how many visitors per day you’re receiving and where they’re coming from it is time to start using some methods to gain web site traffic.

Gaining Web Site Traffic

The best method with the highest return on investment of gaining web site traffic is to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on a web site. Traffic from the natural search engines such as Google is free and for some online businesses, this accounts for 80-percent of their sales. Spending a couple of thousand dollars on search engine optimization may seem like a lot of money. But if your site has, say, 10 pages in the top rankings of the search engines (SE’s), do you think the resulting traffic will make this money back? If the answer is no, then you may not wish to do SEO. But if the answer is yes, which is most often the case, then you’ll not only recoup the investment but most likely gain thousands of dollars more in sales on your site. Isn’t this what you’re going for in the first place?

Since SEO is a slow, long-term plan for gaining web site traffic, typically taking months for the rankings to kick in, many web site owners choose to use a pay-per-click campaign to gain traffic in the short term. Pay-per-click programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo / Overture Site Match are a way to see immediate results by placing a web site in the Sponsored Listings section of the SE’s search results page. Traffic from these campaigns can also help you judge the viability of the keywords you’ve chosen for the SEO campaign. When doing pay-per-click (PPC) you basically bid on a keyword or key-phrase. The more you pay, the higher you appear in the Sponsored Listings and the more traffic the web site will receive. The downside of pay-per-click, though is that you keep paying and paying and paying for the traffic. Soon you’ill spend way more on PPC than on the optimization services.

Press releases (PR’s) are another great way to generate web site traffic. In the recent Search Engine Strategies seminars it was pointed out that the major search engine news feeds actually scan online press releases to see what they are about and rank them accordingly. So, just when you thought you could get away with writing standard press releases, now you would do well to write optimized press releases. The major SE’s scan these press releases like they do an html page, looking for keywords in order to categorize and rank the release. If you have a timely story or happening about your site, write and submit an optimized press release on a place such as PRWeb.com and see your traffic grow. Or if you don’t wish to do your own, there is a new business called SEO-PR who will do this for you.

There are many other methods in gaining web site traffic - too many to fully cover here. But to name a few, it is worth check out: article writing, opt-in email advertising, newsletter advertising (your own and others), give-aways, contests and promotions and banner advertisement.

A good idea once you gain traffic is to employ a website monitoring service such as that from Webmetrics to monitor your site for downtime. Too much downtime may mean the robots are unable to spider your site and will adversely affect your rankings.

Search engine optimization is not an end all and be all for everyone when it comes to generating more web site traffic. Many different and varied online marketing practices should be employed. When employing these other practices, though, don’t neglect SEO because you can be sure your competition isn’t neglecting it.

It’s important to make sure that the web site loads as quickly as possible and that people can easily access all the pages. Waiting time should not exceed 30 seconds and links to other pages should be easily accessible. .