Many Search Engine Optimizers (SEO) provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted.

However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a bad name through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.

Unfortunately, there are many hollow promises, and some sheer lies. There are certain tools a Webmaster can use to improve the relevance of a site to a search engine.

Meta Tags can be placed strategically within the code of the web pages to inform the spiders which "crawl" through the billions of pages on the internet, indexing them, what the page is all about.

The more often your site is updated is picked up and noted, and links to and from your site from other sites also tells the search engines that your site is obviously very important.

According to 2007 April figures from Nielsen//NetRatings, Google has the largest share of U.S. based web searches at 55.2% (Google Acquisitions), Yahoo is second at 21.9%, MSN is third at 9.0%, AOL is fourth at 5.4%, and Ask is fifth at 1.8%. Google is growing and will continue to; it was at 45% in September 2005 and upto to 49% in July 2006.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google.

There is no priority submit for Google.

While Google never sells better ranking in their search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results.

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to their index.

In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in their results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when their spiders crawl the web.

So anyone claiming to guarantee better placement on Search Engines like Google does not have a special secret.

At the heart of Google software is a system called PageRank, which basically gives every site on the Internet a rank from 0-10. So how is this calculated? Well, the page rank of your site is determined by the links to your web site. Each time somebody adds a link to your web site, Google interprets this as a vote for your site. The more links you have to your site, the more votes you get.

But Google also looks a little deeper than just sheer volume of links, and analyses the importance of the web site that has cast a vote for your site.

Sites that Google determines are important are those with a higher PageRank. So a link to you from a site with a PageRank of 6 is better than a link from a site with a PageRank of 3. In fact, 1 link from a site with a PageRank of 6 is better than 10 links from PageRank 3 sites.




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