Whether you are the head of a major corporation or just a owner of a basic website, you should beware of the fact and fiction of (SEO) search engine optimization. Everyone from small to large wants to be on the first page of the search results for specific keywords. There are many companies out there willing to have you part with tens of thousands of dollars guaranteeing results! Well you better look closely at what they are proposing before you sign any contract. BEWARE as many con artists with great websites and all kinds of credentials are populating the search engines optimization landscape. You and your employees should take the time to read this report closely for your own benefit. You can avoid wasting your hard earned money as well as give yourself an honest chance to be on the first page of the organic side of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

A friend of mine owns a website www.readymaderugs.com that sells ready made area rugs at wholesale prices to consumers. A great website with a solid selection of quality area rugs, his goal was to make this a retail force, nationally, in the market place for people searching for area rugs. My friend let his web master handle his pay-per-click campaign with mixed results. After a while he felt it was time to take his new business to the organic side of the search engine marketing to help cut costs and generate more traffic for his website. After talking to his web master he was guided to a fairl well known SEO company, which will remain nameless. This search engine optimization company with a great name, website and all kinds of testimonials was just waiting to charge his credit card for $7,000. Yes they could make his website number one on google, yahoo, and MSN guaranteed! Certainly this is worth $7,000 over four months or so you would think. Here’s the problem I found after a quick revue of his second report from his so called great SEO company; the guaranteed placement on the search engine was for worthless terms like “readymade rugs.” Well is that worth something? No. That term was searched one, I repeat “one time” Last month. I am quite sure it was my friend doing the searching.

Am I being to hard on their SEO company? I don’t think so. I still don’t know how they sleep at night except that their mattresses are full of web owners cash! Maybe that helps.

Certainly I know my friend could not be guaranteed a first page position under the search term “area rugs.” It is searched a half million times a month. But he could have been guaranteed first page for “ Karastan area rugs” which received 2,500 searches a month. A lot better than one. Even terms like “black area rug” or “blue area rugs” ect. Would have been better then “readymade rugs.”

Last, my friends website would have ended up in first place for “ readymade rugs” in time anyway. So before you sign and or commit to anything in the search engine marketing scam BEWARE.

Okay, now what?

Following will be a brief simple rundown on what to do and look for to maximize your SEO exposure and assure good results!

To me your web address is the single most important issue for search engine optimization. The closer you can get to the search term the better the results will be. To test this read search “area rugs” on google and notice how most of the url’s contain the words area rugs. Try searching “Vegas” and you will see exactly the same.
Here is an example to try and follow:

Try not to use more than three hyphens in the url’s extension. Okay we could discuss url’s and the importance and debate the issue of that importance for days but, I don’t have time. The fact is that the url matters immensely and that you can take it to the bank.

In my opinion the tag is the second most important issue. Especially for librarians at the various directories. There are no hard and fast rules for writing titles but here are a couple of guidelines to follow: first keep the number of characters at 66 or below if possible, second the title is displayed in wed search results by the majority of search engines. All that matters is relevancy! Following is the perfect title by Vegas.com

So remember if google or yahoo crawl your website and find that your title’s are relevant to the page or which they are written you have a better chance of a good ranking.

“Most search engines do not read the Meta Keywords Tag anymore.” Don’t you believe it? The search engines do not count this area as they used to, because of abuse by web masters but it still is important. So to be safe use about 15 keywords, repeated by commas that are not too repetitive.

The search engines have developed programs to eliminate websites with spammy keywords, so it is my belief that they still have some use.

All of your web pages should have different and applicable titles, keywords and descriptions as described above. If you really want to do things right especially on the home page, research areas like; Meta Robots Tag, Meta Refresh Tag, Meta Author Tag, Meta Distribution Tag and Meta Revit Tag just to name a few. Your web master should be knowledgeable about there areas and worth discussion.

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