Search Engine Specialization is another one of those terms that is used often by SEO/SEM agencies. SES is the process of optimizing various pages for different search engines. Let’s see an example here. Imagine you are American express, and based on a research that you have done you see much higher conversions rates on Yahoo for consumer credit cards and not business credit cards. If your conversion rates are significantly higher on Yahoo than Google, then you may want to optimize your page in accordance to Yahoo! search engine optimization guidelines. For a credit card company, acquisition and not traffic is the most important factor, and it is one of those cases that may make sense to conduct SES for the sake of higher conversion rates. But SES is nothing new. Believe it or not I have seen companies that focus on Yahoo! or MSN specialization to differentiate themselves from their SEO competitors. While SES is an interesting concept, if you haven’t done any SEO in the past, you may want to hold off on that.

So we all have heard of SEM, SEA, and SEO. Most of us anyway. But what the heck is SMO? SMO is social media optimization, and it is a pretty recent phenomenon. As Web 2.0 companies started to pop out of nowhere every second, a few smart SEOs decided to invent a new “big bucks” term to keep earning ‘em. Social media optimization is the process of using social networking and tagging sites such as Digg, Reddit, and even YouTube to promote a site. Obviously, you need to have the right message to be able to grab the readers’ attention. Social media optimization can help you in multiple ways. First, it gains you more visibility on the web, and that always helps. In addition, in most cases you get a valuable inbound link back from these social networking sites and that can pretty much help your site with its ranking. Not only that, more people can use the social media to link to your original content, and you reap the benefits of that overtime. But SMO is no rocket science. It is probably not as scientific as search engine optimization or even paid search, but it seems to be almost as valuable these days. That is till Google finds a way to discredit the links that are coming from social media sites.

Many non-technical folks are too nervous to try things that might be slightly technical. Search Engine Optimization is one of those things. It is not too hard to imagine that a person with no or little technical knowledge might think of SEO for rocket science. Basic SEO can be done by anyone, and I mean anyone who is patient enough to do the basic things. Fixing the structure of a page, changing the meta tags, creating contents that have a certain keyword density, can all be done by a non-technical person. Even keyword analysis, to a certain degree can be done by someone with no or limited technical knowledge. Should you do SEO yourself? It depends. While anyone can do SEO, the results might come later than sooner if you choose to do it yourself. Good Professional SEOs often no shortcuts to getting better rankings and traffic to a site, so if your site is mission critical and vital to your business, then you might want to outsource its SEO. If your site is just a hobby for you, then you can probably search optimize your site and have fun while doing it.

When designing a Web Page, many users forget how important the title is to search engines. When I was reading the SEOBook a couple of months ago, it was interesting that a large number of websites on the web are named “untitled.” Aaron was even saying that some of these terms are becoming competitive. The fact of the matter is many Web site owners are not that tech savvy and simply forget to name their pages. But search engines pay extra attention to page titles. SEOs would tell you that first you need to have your keyword as a part of your file name. The name of the file could be something like keyword.htm, which is far better than XYZ.htm. Also, the title should include the keyword you are trying to get ranked for. Whatever you do, remember that your title tags are one of the most important ranking factors to search engines. Keep ‘em unique, keep ‘em targeted, and you are in business!

I can’t stress enough how important it is to make top quality sites if you are thinking about getting ranked on Google or Yahoo!. Obviously, having a site full of high quality content will bring more readers and users in, and they will link to your stories or content, which will help you get ranked higher on search engines. Many online marketers choose quantity over quality just to make a few more bucks. I know a marketer who owns over 1000 domain names for each and every niche that you can think of, and he has this set of pre-made templates with Google Adsense injected into them. But while in general the more is the better, you need to have content that actually provide some value to your visitors. I heard some stories about people who were claiming that content is not king. That is not true at all. Think about it. If you have unique content on your pages that satisfy your readers’ needs, then you are in business. But if you are just copying and pasting from some poor guy that you found on the web, then you are stealing! Not only that, duplicate content is not really what readers are looking for. Unfortunately, we have a lot of that today, but believe me, search engines are getting good at finding the relevant content and its uniqueness. So next time someone says content is not all that matters, tell them to buzz off!

There has been a number of debates about the effects of submitting URLs to Google and Yahoo engines manually or by using a software package. The fact of the matter is, there is no evidence that such act would increase the ranking of websites. Google and Yahoo put emphasis on site quality and keyword optimization. Therefore, if your site is live and you are securing incoming looks to your site, then Google and Yahoo will find it eventually. As a matter of fact, being found organically usually gives you a better chance to get ranked higher on search engines. So, one needs to be careful before messing with software packages such as Hello! Engines or SimpleSEO. This doesn’t mean you can’t use them at all. Just don’t use them to submit a site.

Many of us who don’t know what SEO is all about have this question. We know what SEO is in general, but how do we get started? The best way to get started is obviously by observation. What I mean by that is one should first look at different search engines out there. There are four main engines that one should definitely focus on before going after smaller, less known engines. MSN, Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com are the main search engines that you should know about. Google is obviously the leading search engine, but Yahoo is close second. MSN and Ask.com are trying to compete with these guys for a share of the pie. Obviously, the search-engine market is very important to Microsoft, and you can bet Microsoft will not be satisfied with their current position in the market. Now, it’s time for some observation. Find a topic that interests you and search for that topic using the 4 main search engines. Compare the results! Are they the same? Look at how things are presented on each of those 4 sites. Do you find one particularly more helpful than others? As I mentioned, there is a lot that can be learned by observation, so never stop doing that!

A lot of people nowadays talk about how they use SEO techniques to bring more users to their websites. But what is SEO anyway? SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is a set of techniques that allows a website to be ranked higher by a search engine. Think about it. Most of us have used some search engine, whether it is Google or Yahoo! Search or MSN is not the point, in our lifetime. What happens is that we search for a topic, and we get a set of results. However, sometimes you would get 20000 entries back. Experts claim that most people do go over more than the first 20-30 entries. So, if you happen to be in the other 19980 websites, you are out of luck. Using Search Engine Optimization techniques would allow someone like you to move higher in the rankings and drive more users to your site. So, SEO is indeed important for website owners, and they should at least know about it. But keep that in mind. SEO does not mean writing for search engines for the sake of gaming the system. That is not a good practice and you can lose your users in the long run. Your goal as a SEO should be to provide value to users while optimizing for search engines. The text that you put on your site, the links that you get from other and you link to should all be for the purpose of adding value and enriching your visitors’ experiences with your site and nothing more!

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