When surfers conduct searches on search engines they are presented with a list of results for that search term. These results are called Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and generally speaking, the websites that appear at the top of the SERPs will receive plenty of traffic to their websites from searchers.

In order to determine your position on the SERPs, search engines use their own algorithms. While nobody knows for absolute certain what these algorithms are it is widely accepted that your website needs to be easy to navigate, popular and relevant.

Easy navigation means that your site should have text links to each of its pages. If you use a flash menu system then you should include a sitemap in order that search engines and visitors can quickly and easily find their way around the whole of your website.

In order to make your website appear popular you need to get links to your site. While search engines would rather these links were generated because visitors to your site genuinely found your content useful, it is commonplace to undertake a reciprocal link campaign or generate inbound links. Reciprocal links mean a website links to you in exchange for a link to their own site.

Relevance is judged by your content. By including the keywords you place in the metatags of your site throughout the body of your content and in certain places within your site you are indicating to the search engines that your website contains relevant information.

By combining these factors you can effectively convince search engines that you deserve to be near the top of their SERPs. However, this can take time and a lot of effort if you dont fully understand what you are doing.

Search engine ranking gives internet users a way to determine if the page returned from the search they performed is of any value to them. The higher your search engine ranking, the more likely potential customers are to click on it. The lower your search engine ranking, the more likely customers are to never even find your website. There are three simple ways you can advance your search engine ranking and improve your business and your profits.

The first way to improve your search engine ranking is to pick your target key words carefully. When someone searches for something related to your business, you want your page to land in the top ten results offered by that search engine. Each page in your site should have more than one key word. Moreover, your site key words should be at least two words long. For example, instead of stamps, you might want to use stamp collecting. There are both free websites and pricey software that can offer you the best analysis of what key words you should use on your site. These can help you choose the right key words for your site.

Second, one of the main rules in search engine rankings is the frequency and location of key terms on your website. If the search term appears in your HTML tag, you are more likely to get a higher rating from a search engine. Moreover, search engines look for the key terms at the top of the page. Search engines are looking for the term in the headline or the first few paragraphs of the page. The nearer to the top, the more the search engine assumes the page is related to the topic the searcher is looking for. Another thing search engines look for is the frequency of the term. Search engines examine how frequently you use the term in relation to all of the other words on the website. They calculate the percentage and the higher the percentage, the higher your page ranking. It is important to remember, though, that some search engines are built to detect spamming, or using the term too many times to direct searchers to an unrelated page. Sites that detect spamming will not only exclude your site in their results; they may also ban your site from their results on a permanent basis. Deliberately spamming can be a lot of work as well. You have to constantly battle to keep your key words at the level the rankings will require. Deliberate spamming is ethically wrong, and you should not resort to it to increase your page rankings. Paying attention to the location and frequency of the search terms on your website can greatly improve your search engine ranking.

Finally, build relevant content on your page. Be sure that your page reflects the key words. Using HTML text wherever you can will help both search engines and your visitors to determine the relevance of your site. Using large graphics means the search engine cannot read your site. While they may look nice, they will not improve your search engine rating. That relevant content should include building on your text references. If your key word is collecting, consider offering an alternate key word of collectors. This can keep your site from being eliminated by some engines as redundant.

Increasing your key word rankings can really help increase your business. It can direct more traffic to your website that you ever thought possible. Remember though; do not get tied up in your rankings. Even if you do not see an improvement in your rankings, you will at least know you should concentrate on something besides your page rank that will help you improve your site ranking.

The doorway page, the satellite page, the channeling page, the information page, the landing page, the entry page, the bridge page…, whatever you call them they’ve long been considered the bete noir of Leeds SEO or search engine optimisation. Everyone’s got their own definition but all of them embrace roughly the same principle, a heavily optimised keyword or keyword phrase-riddled page built solely to attract the search engines that then links back to a main web site.

Some of these will be made up of pure and absolute nonsense bar the top paragraph, that will be proper English with a link back to the main site using the keyword or key phrase as anchor text in the backlink or IBL (Inbound Back Link). The same keyword or phrase will similarly appear in the page’s title tag, the meta description tag and the header or H1 tag, while the rest of the page will be utter gobbledegook, machine-generated Babel spam with the keyword or key phrase sprinkled randomly through the content just to a density which will appeal to the search engines.

Others will be made up entirely of this machine-generated keyword or phrase riddled spam and will automatically redirect through use of javascript or a meta-refresh to a completely different site. Leeds SEO techniques like this, when (not if) discovered will inevitably suffer some kind of search engine penalty if not necessarily an outright ban.

Traditionally it will characteristically also be a page that stands alone outside the main body of a site, existing on it’s own as an individual entity. It will have no incoming (IBL) links from the site; any that it does have will probably be coming from series of similar pages, all created with the same aim in mind, to rank highly in all or a particular engine for a particular specific search term.

If you do a search for doorway page in Google amazingly there are still adverts for companies who openly announce their dubious expertise in this frowned upon Leeds SEO practice despite the very highly-publicised decision by Google to ban BMW for, among other things, their blatant use of this forbidden Leeds SEO technique.

Perhaps a better approach would be to note that now, though, you can legitimately use this basic optimisation technique by making each page into an article and submitting it to an article distribution site. No-one seems to have realised yet, or if they have they haven’t drawn any particular attention to it, that while using doorway pages is still very much a Black Hat Leeds SEO technique, one that can and has been known to get sites banned, you can exercise good White Hat Leeds SEO by creating articles that perform exactly the same Leeds SEO function as a doorway page and no-one will complain or even adversely comment. It seems that, in the eyes of the engines, if you hang the label “article” on a certain kind of doorway page it then becomes perfectly acceptable to all.

For instance, is this article linked to from my site? No it is not. Is this article heavily optimised with keywords related to Leeds SEO and key phrases related to search engine optimisation? Indeed it is. It fulfils, then, at least some of the criteria exponents of so-called “Ethical Leeds SEO” would use to label it as search engine spam, but manifestly, in commenting on the phenomenon it is itself a part of, it isn’t spam at all, more (I believe myself) an example of social commentary on the search engine optimisation or Leeds SEO industry.

So then, is this article itself a doorway page? Like so much in search engine optimisation, that really depends on your own individual point of view. My advice? Look not at what I say I do, look instead at what results from what I do – if I have a high-ranking stand-alone page for popular Leeds SEO keywords with a link back to my main site from it, one that can not be banned for being a doorway page because it is in fact an article that’s about doorway pages, what will the consequences actually be?

Strange, Grasshopper, strange are the ways of the Leeds SEO!

With the millions and millions of websites in existence today, how do you get yours noticed? The most common way is for it to be high up in the rankings of useful and relevant websites. Google is the most widely used search engine today. When someone keys in a search term on Google, you can only hope that your website comes up in the first ten pages of results. You do not have to sit there and just hope, though. There are a number of things you could do to improve your chances of being noticed.

Google came up with a system to determine how important a website is. Everyday, Googles automated programs called spiders crawl the World Wide Web. The purpose is to index all the existing web pages out there. The information these spiders gather is used as the basis for calculating what Google calls PageRank. This concept was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Stanford University.

What exactly is PageRank? It is an algorithm which assigns numerical weights to linked pages. The higher the figures, the more important the page is. The PageRank is resultant of how many pages link to your own page. It is of no use to make bogus incoming links to your page though. Google gives more weight to more reputable sites that link to your page. Bogus and paid incoming links can actually be detected. The algorithm takes into account all incoming links both external and internal.

This is where sitemaps come into the picture. As can be gathered from the name, sitemaps are basically a guide to what can be found in your website. It is a page within your site wherein the user can see the overall structure and informational content. It contains links to all the pages in your website.

Will providing a sitemap increase your Google PageRank? The answer is simple: yes it may. As mentioned earlier, the PageRank system also takes into account internal links. The more pages you have in your website, the higher you PageRank. A word of caution is necessary here. Pages should contain original content and not simply be copies of each other. Otherwise, your PageRank may actually decrease. As the spiders follow links to get to web pages, a sitemap will actually facilitate the travel of these spiders within your site. If each of the pages on your web site are interconnected and are easily accessible from one page, then chances are the spiders will find the necessary information faster and easier. Experts suggest that you put only a maximum of 100 links in one page. If you have more than that number of links, you should create different sets of sitemaps. In order for the idea of the sitemap to really work, you need to provide a link to the sitemap on every page on your website.

The keys to increasing your PageRank are fairly simple. Include original content in as many pages as you can. Link your pages together. Create a sitemap to make navigation easier. Provide links to the sitemap for each page. This way, both user and spiders can find all the information that you have to offer.

Tracking

Before you start your Leeds SEO campaign make sure to implement a quality web stats package that lets you know what search engine spiders are visiting your site, what keywords are referring the most traffic to your site, and how many hits/page views you are getting.

Build great design

To get the best search engine visibility web designers should follow the 5 basis rules if web design which states that web site should be:

Easy to read
Easy to navigate
Easy to find
Consistent in design and layout
Quick to download

Write effective Title tag on the page

Arguably the most important ranking factor for effective natural Leeds SEO is the title denoted by the – title – tags on HTML. This title is considered primary text by the search engines meaning that all the search engines record this text and place considerable value on it. It is important because it is the first text shown in the search results as a hyperlink to your site. As a general rule a descriptive title should be 5 to 10 words for each page or 69 to 75 characters.

Body text

On your page you should always aim to have a healthy amount of descriptive body text to explain what the page is about, don’t rely on the title of the page. You should aim to have your keyword in the text as much as you can, with it still being comfortable to read. This is known as keyword density. All search engines consider words at the top of the page, above the fold as more important in value than the rest of the page

Domain and the URL

Placing key-words in the domain can have some weighting in the effectiveness of your natural Leeds SEO. The reasoning is that the terms or phrases matching the words you typed in a query are highlighted when you view the search results. This is known as search- term highlighting or term highlighting. Note; If you are going to buy and use a URL that may have already been used in the past, it is worth while checking the history of the URL.

H1, Bold, Italics

You should have your main keywords once in an H1 tag, once in bold and then once in ITALICS, this should show the search engine crawler that these are important words/phrases for the page, so in turn the crawler will make the assumption that the keywords are important for a visitor.

Anchor text

Anchor text is what we call text links. You should always try and have all text links as descriptive keywords. When a spider follows the link to your page it should have an understanding of the content. Anchor text is a great way of improving your rankings on competitive keywords.

Write fresh content

Google loves fresh content. They have a fairly new spider called freshbot, it crawls the web daily looking for new/updated pages and sites. It will then list the page at the top of their index for that sites keywords. It will stay there for a few days, if the page was just an updated version of what is already in the results it will revert back to the old version and drop back to it’s old position, if the page is brand new then it will drop completely from the index, until the next full update when it should take a permanent place in the results.

Linking

Build high quality external links to your website. Sites with high quality credible links pointing into them gain more popularity than sites with low quality links. It is rumoured that Googles places up to 60% of its weighting on quality of party external links:

See: www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/linkbuilding

Page submission

Submit the root page to all the major UK search engines on the Internet: Google, Yahoo, MSN. It will take them a while until they crawl your site fully but be patient. There are plenty of directories online, find one that fits the theme of your site and submit the root URL, again this may take a while but be patient.

The truth is that the search engines are like our childhood game of King Of The Hill. Only one person can be at the top of the hill and the top of the search results. Only ten websites can be on page one of the search results. When a new website moves into the top ten, another must be removed.

For any given search term at any given time, there are only ten web pages on page one of the search results, and there are millions of web pages that did not make page one, who may or may not catch a few stragglers from the search engines.

How Can A Website Break Into The Top Ten?

Search Engine Optimization (Birmingham SEO) is an industry that has sprung up around the concept of helping their clients improve their rankings in the search engine results.

When you talk to Birmingham SEO professionals, they generally point to a two-pronged approach to search ranking optimization. A website owner needs to optimize their on-site real estate for the search engines, and they need to build inbound links to their website.

On-Site Search Optimization Challenges

The trick with on-site search optimization is that you must cater to multiple audiences on your website.

* You must provide simple navigation and an attractive interface to the human visitor;

* You must provide good sales copy to your human visitors, for the purpose of converting them from shoppers to buyers;

* You must provide text copy for the search engines to read; and

* You must optimize your content to help the search engines know what topics and keywords they should pay attention, so that they can give their users the right web page for the right search terms.

A web page that draws good search rankings is useless if the web page cannot convert the human visitor to a buyer. Many website owners get caught up in the process of optimizing a web page to get it to the top of the search results, and they forget that the human visitor knows where the Back Button is in his or her browser. Once your visitor has hit the Back Button, they will go to someone else’s website and buy from them, instead of you.

Most website owners have the alternate problem. They consistently convert a significant number of visitors to buyers, but they have to rely on various forms of paid advertising to get visitors to their websites, since they do not rank in the search engines.

I recently spoke with an individual who spends ,000 per month on pay-per-click advertising to get targeted traffic to his website. He said he consistently earns back his money, but he was still looking for a better way to get ranked in the search engines, so he joined my client list.

On-Site Search Engine Optimization Basics

According to the search engine companies, there are more than one thousand calculations that determine how well a website will rank in their search engine result pages (SERPs).

The Google engineers are fond of saying that if you build your website for human beings instead of search engines, then your website should rank well in their algorithms. To a certain degree, this is a good strategy.

Think about how magazines are constructed:

The Table Of Contents shows story titles, brief descriptions, and page numbers telling you where you can find a story.

On the story page, the title will be in big, bold font. Sometimes, the magazine will include a brief blurb about the story, in italics or font that is a bit bigger than the story font.

Pictures support the story with captions that further develop the story, by describing the picture.

Major subsections of the story have their own subheadings. And, the primary body of the story is in regular plain text, with only an occasional bolded or italicized word or phrase.

By analyzing the title and other large text on the page, a person who is flipping through the pages of a magazine can quickly assess the story content and make the decision as to whether they want to read the full story.

In the most simplistic way, this is how the search engines analyze a websites’ content to decide which web page will best serve their users’ needs.

Off-Site Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Basics

Since the inception of Google, and with Yahoo and MSN recently, the number and quality of links pointing to a website play a significant role in determining how well a web page will rank in the search results.

I have heard people suggest that as much as 75% of the value given to a web page in the search results is based solely on the number and quality of links pointing to a web page. I tend to believe a more conservative number (50.1%) will apply.

Inbound Links Are More Important Than Page Content

To prove this point, type “click here” without the quotes into Google, Yahoo and MSN and check the Adobe pages that come up in the search results: #1 in Google, #2 in Yahoo, and #1 in MSN. When you pull up those pages, search the page to find the individual words “click” or “here” in the text of those pages. They are not there. This has happened because millions of people have linked to these Adobe pages with the embedded anchor text, “click here”.

Next, let’s analyze those specific web pages from the perspective of each of the search engines:

* Google’s #1 result – (Google PageRank 8). Links to this web page: according to Google (31); according to Yahoo (nearly 12 million); according to MSN (6,400).

* Yahoo’s #2 result – (Google PageRank 10). Links to this web page: Google (15,200); Yahoo (700 thousand); MSN (32).

* MSN’s #1 result – (Google PageRank 8). Links to this web page: Google (0); Yahoo (2.9 million); MSN (778).

On Google’s top result, they show 31 inbound links total for that web page. But, Yahoo claims that there are more than 12 million links to this page. That is a huge difference.

On Yahoo’s #2 result, MSN gives 32 links, Google gives 15,000 links, and Yahoo claims it has 700 thousand links! That is another huge difference between the link counts from the search engines.

On MSN’s #1 result, MSN shows a strong link count, but still nowhere near Yahoo’s 2.9 million links. But, how does a web page with zero links in Google get a PageRank 8?

What Do These Numbers Mean?

Google has always said that they will never show us all of the links that we have pointing to our websites, because anything we can see in the public search results, our competitors can see also. So, for me it really is no surprise that we cannot see all of the links that point to Adobe pages, or to the links we have created that point to our clients and ourselves, by querying the search engines.

Also, the sheer numbers of inbound links do not rule the roost. Google’s #1 result (PR8) is actually shown in Google, before Yahoo’s #2 (PR10) result.

The Proof For Link Building Is In The Search Engine Rankings

Recently, a fellow who works as a Birmingham SEO “professional” told me that be believed my link building system was a sham.

I showed him that on the top 51 keyword phrases we use to market our original commercial website, we had 11 number one results, 31 top five results, 34 top ten results, 47 top thirty results, and 51 top 100 results within the Google search results. Additionally, it was shown that only three of those results competed with fewer than one million search results according to Google, with the remaining 48 pages competing with one million to 533 million pages.

Ole boy tore up Google trying to track how it was possible for me to have accomplished what I claimed. He finally concluded that since Google would not show HIM how I was able to rank so well in their search engine results, then I must have been lying.

According to Yahoo, we have over 12,000 links from third-party websites. According to our site statistics, we received traffic from more than 16,000 unique web pages during 2006. And Google still swears that we only have 42 inbound links to our website!

Magic Fairy Dust

My nemesis concluded that since HE could not prove through Google how I was successful in getting good search rankings, then I could not have accomplished such results by the methods I claimed.

Okay, I admit it.

I used the exact same method that Adobe used to get to the top of Google’s search engine rankings. I have a pocket full of magic fairy dust. Whenever, I do not like how my websites rank in the search engines, I sprinkle my magic fairy dust on my modem.

If you don’t like where you are ranked in the search engines, then I suggest you forego the search engine optimization companies altogether and instead run over to the corner store to get your own magic fairy dust. You might have to shop around a bit, but it is out there.

Techno Consultancy provides search engine optimization services in UK which effort jointly to get better a website’s organic or natural search result rankings. Improved traffic and visitors which lead to sales, sign-ups, calls or some other call-to-action are the last part goals of achieving top search engine rankings.

What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is the process of increase the amounts of visitors to a website by ranking high in a search term of search engines. Top search engine rankings normally consequence in more traffic to your site, and as a effect, a higher chance to covert a visitor into a sale, lead, call or any other call to achievement your website has. Particularly, search engine optimization UK or London SEO London is a sequence of techniques used to increase or very search engine optimization well tune your website’s content to convene the algorithmic criteria of the search engines. The search engines require seeing positive attributes within your web page content so they will enhanced appreciate what your website’s intention is along with your favorite keywords. Web pages require to be modified in many dissimilar styles and formats to get this understanding from the search engines. As a consequence of optimization, the search engines will then start ranking your site according to the recently optimized content of your website.

Techno Consultancys Search Engine Optimization Process:
We, at Techno Consultancy carry out search engine optimization services on a monthly basis to make sure the continuing development of your web pages natural search consequence rankings. We first set up what your goals are in this procedure as well as what keywords you would like us to focal point our hard works towards. We will then get a look at your site’s the past to see if the site has any accessible keyword rankings or if it is yet submitted and listed in the nearly everyone vital search engines. With this information and thoroughly keyword research performed, a plan will be developed to address the immediate optimization needs of the site as well as the extended term wants of the site such as link building. The original months of the movement will be enthusiastic towards optimizing your site’s content to get together the principles that the search engines expect. The following months will be used to determine, preserve or get better the rankings your site has attained.
Our London SEO service is “full service” sense that we will capture think about of the whole thing together with the edits to your website. If you or your web designer would prefer to generate the edits to your site content, we will be on hand over to verify that each edit was complete effectively.

Be that as it may, for new websites it is always a good idea to start doing all that before exploring other avenues. In this article I will look at why search engine optimization is necessary, proceeding to unravel basic issues in this game before touching on aging factor which I believe is the cornerstone of success on the web.

Why search engine optimization?

When you are looking for information on a topic on the web, you usually query your favorite search engine for search terms relevant to your topic. The search engine on its part displays a list of web-pages which it thinks are closely related to your search term. The web-pages that appear at top are considered more important than the ones that appear successively below. Question arises as to how search engines must know which pages are more important for the search query.

This is where you step into the realm of search engine optimization. For all your painstaking effort, if your webpage is not considered important by search engines, you will remain undiscovered forever. Remember, search engines are not humans. They are machines. Which is why you need to let your webpage talk to them to achieve top ranking.

The mental block do I need it?

If search engine optimization is important, why is it that many website owners still do not feel any need for it? One may say they are nave, so they are. I have come across many of them who strongly feel that after a website is launched, nothing more needs to be done. There is a perception that once a website is there in world-wide-web, it is bound to be known soon. Known to whom? Why, Google will know me is a common refrain. It is only much later that one discovers that nobody, not even Google knows his site.

To be true, Googles knowing your website is not a big deal. Just have an already-indexed website point a link to your main page. Google will shortly find out your main page and from there your other pages as well. This is exactly the way Google is indexing billions of new webpages everyday.

On the flip side, suppose your webpage has nice description of trekking in Himalayas. You have provided good information and pictures on the subject in the page. Yet if I am to search for the term trekking in Himalayas in Google, will I get to see your webpage in the first 20 or 30 results? Perhaps not. Because, even though your website is indexed by Google, it still does not know that your webpage on trekking in Himalayas is important enough to be listed high for the term.

On to optimizing web content

If indeed optimizing your web content is necessary, how do you proceed? As mentioned in the beginning, search engine optimization is an exercise of dressing up your webpage based on a chosen set of keyword phrases. This is to be done in such a way that the content appeals to human visitors as much as it does to search engine robots.

In a previous article [http://www.prioriti.in/blogs/?p=48], I have dealt on how to include keyword phrases to write an optimized content. To be sure, other than optimization you will need quality incoming links as well. But that is a different story.

The basic issues

If we have understood the inevitability of search engine optimization, let us briefly touch upon some basic issues.

1 Search engines list a webpage, not a website. This means one has to optimize individual web-pages (except those that are public disclosures) while maintaining overall aim and balance of the website.

2 Optimization of a webpage, in its primitive, centers around strategically locating one or more keyword phrases in that webpage. Number of keyword phrases to be used and frequency of each will depend on total number of content-words in that page.

3 Optimization for search engines is not an one-off exercise. Rather it has to be an ongoing effort to create web-pages. Websites that are veterans of many years have thousands of web-pages in their database.

4 Search engine optimization usually does not fetch immediate result. For new websites, specially in case of Google, it can be a long wait, sometimes several months.

5 If your website generates lot of traffic by itself, it has a fair chance to rank high in SERPs (search engine result pages), even if you have not done much of an optimization (for example, xe.coms real-time currency conversion service). This means that your product or service is so unique that simple word-of-mouth publicity is enough to bring in torrents of visitors, while also ensuring prominent rank in search results.

6 Search engine optimization is not merely an exercise of shuffling keyword phrases. The content has to make sense to readers. In other words, ensure that your content passes usability test.

7 Apart from keyword-enriched content, there are more factors responsible for achieving top rank, specially building quality links that point to your website. To search engines, incoming links are like votes in favor of your website. A good quality link carries considerable weight in the eyes of search engines.

8 Finally, lest one forgets, optimizing for search engines is only one part of the game. The other equally important necessity is to retain and satisfy your visitors.

Summing up the aging factor

In Bengali, my mother tongue, there is a saying, which when roughly translated, means seasoned paddy-grains make more rice. In Birmingham SEO parlance, nothing beats if you are at it for years. Search engines love the aging factor. Create good content. Allow it to settle. Revisit it to update occasionally. Repeat the cycle.

In other words, search engine optimization is all about letting it known that your website is a treasure-hub of great relevant content that only gets better as time passes.

What Is Natural Search?
For those who aren’t quite clear what the term means, “natural” or “organic” search describes the “editorial” search results on any particular engine. These results are purported to be completely non-biased – meaning that the engine will not accept any amount of money to influence the rankings of any individual sites. This is quite different than the paid advertising that appears in “sponsored” or “featured” results, in which higher positions are rewarded to the companies willing to pay the most per visitor.
Why Is Natural Search Important?
Savvy searchers who understand the difference between paid and natural results are more likely to hold the natural results in a higher regard, much like a person reading a magazine would probably be more positively influenced by an article about a particular company than by a paid advertisement from the company.
It is also likely that natural search will become more important in the coming months. Yahoo’s new Site Match program, which mixes some paid results with natural results, is certain to get some close scrutiny from the FTC (even though the fees paid are not supposed to influence rankings). This type of public attention will no doubt educate some oblivious users as to what “sponsored results” actually are. More importantly, other search engines are likely to use this as a means of differentiation from Yahoo. It is no coincidence that Ask Jeeves announced that it was getting rid of its similar program the day after Yahoo’s new program was unveiled, claiming that it was impossible to produce unbiased results using this methodology. Microsoft also recently claimed that they were taking steps to further differentiate paid results from natural results. No matter what the end result, one probable outcome of this new attention to paid search engine advertising is that more average searchers will learn the differences between paid and natural search results, and many will instinctively favor the latter.

What Advantages Do Huge Corporations Have?
Certainly, large companies do have some specific advantages when it comes to natural search.
a. Links- the primary advantage that large corporations have is their ability to obtain large amounts of inbound links, which can have a huge impact on search engine rankings. Often these links are given freely without the company asking (or being aware that it is happening). Many of the huge corporation’s vendors, affiliates, partners, etc. are eager to show their association with the company and link to the corporate site readily and non-reciprocally. Large corporations can also facilitate huge increases in link popularity through a simple corporate policy requiring inbound links from any companies wishing to work with them. In addition, very large corporations may have several websites, which can sometimes be effectively linked together for additional link popularity.
b. Budget- although history shows that a large percentage of major corporations do not spend wisely in this arena, larger corporations typically have larger marketing budgets then their smaller competitors. However, this does not necessarily mean that they will readily allocate a portion of that budget for search engine optimization, as discussed below.
What Advantages Do Smaller Companies Have?
While the advantages of huge corporations, particularly in the area of link popularity, can be difficult to overcome, it is often unnecessary to try. A large percentage of such companies consistently seem to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to natural search engine optimization, a primary reason why small companies can often outperform them. Specific advantages include:

a. A willingness to pursue the channel- Smaller companies are typically more willing to devote resources to natural search than large corporations. Huge things have to happen for a major corporation to get involved in this “new” channel, a channel far removed from the traditional marketing methodologies used to build the giant. Few corporate underlings want to be the one to put their neck on the line and recommend something completely new and “unproven”. Even when a large corporation looks into natural search engine optimization as a potential marketing tool, it can take many months, and sometimes years, for a final decision to be made.
b. A willingness to change the company website- Huge corporations face similar problems when it comes to changing to the corporate website. Within such entities, a person can often not get so much as a comma removed from the text of a secondary page without holding several upper-level management meetings and, ultimately, making a board presentation. Smaller, leaner companies are able to approve necessary website changes more quickly, and are almost always more willing to quickly adapt to the needs of both visitors and search engines.

c. The willingness to outsource- Larger companies have more internal resources at their disposal, and are less likely to outsource this specialized service to someone with proven experience. Often, search engine optimization is treated as an afterthought and dumped on an IT person, who typically has too much to do already and will approach the problem solely from a technical standpoint. Natural search engine optimization is by necessity a combination of marketing and technology. Newcomers to the field (especially those who treat the discipline as strictly a technical issue) often make fundamental mistakes that at best do not get results and at worst put sites at risk of penalization.
d. A lack of technical hurdles- Huge corporations are more likely to have technical issues on their website that can prevent search engines from indexing all of their pages. Often the pages of corporate websites are generated “on the fly” from large databases, and such pages (without modification to the URLs) are sometimes never indexed. In addition, (although usability studies are making this happen less often), some huge corporations have their sites built entirely in flash or use other technologies that are virtually invisible to search engines.
The Bottom Line
To most huge corporations, search engine optimization is often a very small piece of an enormous puzzle – and it is a piece they have been doing without for years. The necessary steps required to fully embrace the channel are often enough to stop any well-intentioned initiative in its tracks. As most search engine optimization experts will tell you, some of the most egregious search engine mistakes are consistently made by household name companies – leaving their smaller, leaner competitors the opportunity to take full advantage.
Help with website design and search engine marketing can be found at www.onlinewebconsultants.com. The specialist here are experienced and certified in search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Your very first consideration when optimizing web pages should be keywords. Your online success is determined on how well you can choose these; After all, this is what visitors have typed into Google or another search engine to find what they are looking for.

Keywords should be in demand, meaning frequent searches are being conducted on Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc. Words with a count of 300 to 500 are good. Words with counts of 500 to 1,000 are great (maybe). Count here means how many times per month the term has been searched on.

A good rule of thumb is to pick terms that have KEI (keyword effectiveness
Index) of 10 or greater. KEI is a large potentially complex topic, fortunately all you need to focus on is knowing that the higher the index the easier the term will be to optimize. In other words a high demand search term with not too many competing websites will receive a higher KEI than a high demand search term with many, many competing websites.

You need to focus on keywords that are in demand, yet not so competitive that ranking in the top 3 pages in the Yahoo!, MSN and Google is within reach.

I must stress going through the process of offline optimization using poor keywords is useless. They should be specific enough to get targeted traffic but not so obscure that no one is searching those terms.

If you optimize your website using poorly chosen keywords, your end result may be increased online traffic, but not bringing the specific type of visitor you had in mind, so it is very critical to get this right, all your other optimization efforts are influenced by the initial keyword terms you ultimately decide on.