Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term you should have heard around the web. If not, let me formally define SEO for you: the process of optimizing your website in order to rank higher on search engines. Whoa. That means search engine optimization helps you achieve higher search engine rankings.

Are you seeing how powerful this is? No?

Picture this: you start a great website talking all about making money on the internet (a popular topic these days). So now you’ve got your own cyberspace property set up and devoted to telling people how to make their fortune online.

But how are people finding your site? Well by and by, the most common method is through search engines.The major search engine companies to date are:
1) Google
2) Yahoo
3) MSN
(in that order). This means that our major efforts are going to be focused on optimizing our webpages for google. Why? Google is officially the search engine giant and seems to be going nowhere but up. That’s great news for us.

Now back to the topic at hand. Your money making site needs visitors to come read it. Your competitor also wants people to read his webpage. Now if you employ search engine optimization strategies, you can leap frog him in the search engine rankings (SERPs).

That is, you just greatly increased the chance that the visitor will come to your site instead of your competitors.

Think about how you use a search engine. You bang in a keyword to search and then what? You’ll usually end up going to one of the first three sites. Well the truth is that these days you don’t stand much of a chance making it into those top three SERP positions if you haven’t learned the secrets of search engine optimization.

Learning SEO

Well that’s what I’ve set out to do with this blog: teach you search engine optimization strategies that will get your site to the top of the search engine rankings.

Before we get to that though (subsequent posts) the question is: how does Google decide search engine rankings? Well now we’ve stumbled on the root question…

Search engine rankings

Googlebot (the automated robot created by Google) will find your pages on the internet and instantly read through them. It will then try to figure out what your page is about. Now here’s where you have to ask yourself: is it easy to tell what your page is about? Well what you see and what googlebot sees are two very different things.

Googlebot doesn’t see images, CSS or javascript. That means your very pretty blog can look all mucked up when Googlebot shows up. OK don’t panic, we’ll fix these things in later posts.

The first question we’re going to look at is: how will my site rank well?

Well here’s the thing. Google will scan your page and decide what your page is relevent for. So we’re going to use search engine optimization to try to tell the googlebot exactly what your page is all about.

Manipulating search engines

A quick word about messing around with the G-bot. Sometimes people will say, I really want to rank for keyword X, so they’ll try to get G-bot to think their whole site is about keyword X (if you’re confused right now don’t worry, it means that you’re probably not doing this and you’re fine). Well the problem is that they’re site ISN’T all about keyword X, so they might get ranked for keyword X but have no relevance to it.

Let me make it simpler: this blog is all about search engine optimization. I teach people seo strategies to increase their search engine ranking. OK simple enough. But what if I decided that I would try to make G-bot think that my blog is about cooking (imagining that cooking is a terrific niche to be in). Now G-bot gets confused–is my site about search engine optimization strategies or cooking?

Here’s where the trouble starts. G-bot might even start ranking me for cooking, but visitors will come to my site, see that the title is SEO and my site is all about SEO and they’ll pack up and leave.

Additionally, if I’m trying to make some money with google adsense, confusing the G-bot is a double whammy. Now some of my ads will be about cooking, meaning people reading about search engines will not be interested in these ads.

OK, I went on a bit of a tangent there, let me bring it back to homebase and simplify.

Help the search engines

This is what SEO is all about: helping the search engines. Making these pages more friendly to googlebot. So G-bot will realize that my site is about SEO and will give me adsense ads about SEO and will rank me well for SEO.

So if you’re not ranking very well in Google for your keyword, its because you haven’t properly website optimized. Now I’m going to use an entirely different post to go on about how to optimize for the search engines and all that, lets just keep this one simple and on point about what is SEO.

Test your search engine optimization

Here’s a quick little trick I’ve picked up for testing out the waters of how well you’ve optimized your website. If you’re running adsense, look for the adsense ads on your page.

What ads are showing up? If this post is showing ads for cooking instead of search engine optimization companies, then I screwed up. Usually the Adsense bot and the G-bot have the same way of seeing a page, so one can give you a good feel for the other.

Note: This doesn’t work on brand new pages, since Adsense-bot hasn’t had a chance to come by and read your page.

Learning about SEO

That’s what this blog is for. Once I was lost but now am found. For someone who’s never read this blog before I’ll explain: this blog was a hodge-podge of different online resources, but now I’ll just focus it giving your great information about search engine optimization and how you can improve your search engine rankings.

What is SEO

Let’s recount what we’ve gone over so far: search engine optimization is about changing some things around on our website so Google is better able to understand what our pages are about and will therefore rank us higher in their search engine.

Trying to tinker around with Googlebot is very bad and we will not do it unless we know exactly what we’re doing (again, this’ll be another SEO article). Instead, we’re going to try to help all the search engines by making it easy for them to see what our content is all about and what we should be ranked for.

This will also help serve up relevant ads, increase how many clicks we get and increase our overall earnings. So in later posts we’ll be sure to talk about using these seo techniques to make money.

I hope this has given you a clearer understaning of what search engine optimization is and you can now answer the question: what is SEO?

At Griz’s urging, I took a look at Rev Response, an ad network that isn’t exactly an ad network…

Let me explain: Rev Response is a company that promotes dozens of free trade magazines and publications. You get paid on a per-lead basis for people who sign up and download these free publications…

I’ve already started promoting three publications:

1) 12 killer SEO Tricks

2) SEO keyword strategies

3) 3 Great Website Design Tips

Sounds too good to be true? Not exactly…in order to get your free trade magizine, you need to qualify. That just means that the Rev Response publications are limited to people who are going to actually use them.

So R.R. isn’t just giving out free publications to anyone, which tells me something–they’re a legit company. You see, they hand review every application to see who would benefit from the publication. This way only qualified people are getting a high quality product.

If you’re ever part of a network which gives away free publications willy-nilly, you can bet your money its low quality content. Another sweet thing about Rev Response–they only accept high quality publishers.

Before I go patting myself on the shoulder, I should clarify a few things: the mark of any low quality network is allowing anyone to be part of their network. When I applied for R.R, I also has a few friends with totally unrelated sites apply–they all got rejected.

Now the nice thing is each site is hand reviewed and given an actual reason for rejection. Again, all of these things point to Rev Response being a very high quality network.

Two more little things have really cinched in my mind the fact that Rev Response is great:
1) I have a personal account manager–someone assigned to me in case I need help. They take the extra step and give me her phone number and email in case I never need any help.
2) I get my own little tradepub site to promote products (and I can also direct link). I can even make my tradepub site match my blog: See my site. I haven’t had time to customize it yet, but I will.

All I can say is, if Rev Response adds an option to search for publication by keyword, it would be nothing short of perfect.

I’m sure they have an affiliate program somewhere, but in the interest of showing you that I’m genuinely promoting them, I’m not going to use it.

Sign up at Rev Response to get started.

Till next time,

MJ