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Once your website is all put together, it's time to figure
out how to get people to come to your site! What this means,
exactly, is that when someone searches the web from a search
engine like Google or Yahoo, will the search results include
your website?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, means doing things to
your website that make your website attractive to search engines--you
want search engines to be inclined to put your website at
or near the top of their rankings when someone searches for
something that you feature on your website.
Ideally, you want to be the top search result in a search
related to your website, but this is very, very tough to accomplish.
For instance, let's say you put together a website to sell
cool t-shirts you make. When someone who's looking to buy
a cool t-shirt sits down at his computer, goes to Google,
and types in "cool t-shirts," will the list of websites
Google returns include your website?
If your website is at the top of Google's results, a high
percentage of the people looking for cool t-shirts will come
to your website--and if "cool t-shirts" is something
lots of people are looking for, you're going to be a rich!
 If
you get your site on the second or third page of search results,
you'll get a little traffic, maybe 5-10 visits a day if you're
lucky. Even a hundred visitors a day probably won't result
in enough actual sales to pay for one Starbucks a week! You
need many more daily visits than 5-10 to generate real revenue
or to even to have a worthwhile audience. However, from the
second and third pages of search engine results it is possible
to build interest if your content is exceptional. Anything
is possible if you have exceptional content!
Regardless of everything else written about SEO strategies
below, if the content of your website is unique, exceptionally
well done, AND it is something that's in demand, you're going
to get traffic to your website--it's just a matter of time.
Most websites, however, are similar to sites already
out there in content, information, and/or products offered.
For sites like these, SEO strategies can be the difference-maker
as far as leapfrogging competitors in Google's and Yahoo's
rankings.
There are many strategies you can employ to get your website
to creep up in search engines' rankings over the months (yes,
it takes time!)
Now here's a caveat: Employing so-called "SEO"
strategies is no guarantee that your website will soon appear
at or even near the top of Google's or Yahoo's rankings. Not
only does no one but Google and Yahoo's engineers know exactly
how search engines' algorithms work, but also those algorithms
are constantly being refined. How they rank things is always
changing.
In addition, getting to the top means competing with folks
who have money to spend because, yes, it's possible to actually
pay your way to the top of the rankings!
Alright, let's not worry about EVERYTHING at once. Let's
just go ahead and get started learning how to position your
website so that it has at least a fighting chance to compete
out there on the world wide web!
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