February 20, 2008

Making Money Online: SEO

So what’s this SEO thing, and what does it have to do with making money online? Basically, Search Engine Optimization describes a process of making your website more attractive to the search engines. This is critical as the SE’s drive targeted, free traffic to your site. My purpose on this site is to simply introduce SEO and why it’s so important. There are tons of good books and websites built around SEO already. So this is just a brief intro to the subject only.

Search engines work around the clock. They use specialized software called “spiders”. Now these spiders never sleep, they crawl the world wide web 24/7 recording everything they find. This newly recorded data is then processed by a super sophisticated algorithm.

This algorithm will calculate just how relevant is this newly discovered content. For example a website built on the “FIFA World Cup” niche would have little relevance to a search query for “chicken recipes”. However, a site devoted to the “home cooking” niche would be super relevant to the search. This is exactly what the search engines attempt to identify.

These algorithms change all the time. The search engines are extremely interested in maintaining the highest credibility with their customers (the search engine user). In order to do so, they constantly update their systems to improve accuracy and reliability. Therefore, SEO is a continual process for making money online. It’s not something you do once and forget about. It requires ongoing monitoring and reaction to changes.

Always, always avoid deceptive practices to gain some kind of SEO advantage. The search engines are very quick to discover theses systems. Some may work temporarily, but sooner or later, they are shut down. And when that happens the site is de-indexed and removed from the search engine’s results. This is the worst possible thing that could happen! Now nobody can find your site by submitting a simple search.

There are many legitimate techniques for search engine optimization when making money online. Some things that are attractive to search engines are relevant content, relevant incoming links, and relevant keywords. The key here is to always generate fresh, original content for your sites. Syndicate your content by various methods and get incoming back links to your site. These links pointing at your site are kind of like individual votes for your site. Generally, the more votes you get, the higher the search engine will rank your page. Of course, use keyword placement to identify keywords (searches) for which your site has relevance.

While specific techniques will come and go, adding keyword rich, original content will never go out of style. Always play it safe and only use White Hat techniques for content generation.

SEO is very important to your prospects for making money online. Don’t overlook this fundamental building block.  Remember, your hard work is rewarded with free, highly-targeted traffic looking for exactly what you offer!

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