Ritty in the City©
print media, internet development, marketing studio

Web site Marketing is the general term for the
many different methods we use to increase
the visibility of your web site. This may mean
increasing your web site’s ranking on search
engines or advertising on Google, Yahoo or other search engines in order to get you exposure on
the internet.


What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is simply
taking a web site and making it rank well for certain
key phrases on search engines. How do we do
this? By arranging and formatting site code -
including meta tags, content, and the site structure
to maximize keyword density and frequency.
Confused yet? Don't be - read on.

When someone conducts a search on the internet,
say for example someone is searching for
"key largo hotels . Search engine spiders start searching through all the contents of all the web
sites (indexing), looking for "mortgage lender".

These search engine spiders “read” web sites in a
very similar way to humans. They process all the
text, consider the links, navigation, page titles, meta tags, and alt tags on images (among other
elements of the web site), analyzing each part to
decide the relevancy of the site as a "whole". The
only thing the search engines can't do like us
humans, is see all the nice pictures. So if you have
a web site selling mortgages, and all you have are pictures of homes, it may look nice, but there is no
way for the search engines to find you.

That is why when we optimize a page for the search engines, we have to describe what search engines can't see within the back-end coding. These descriptions are hidden from view to everyone
except the search engines, (and webmasters of
course) and allows the spiders to better
understand what your site is all about. This is a
win-win situation. It provides the people conducting
the search with more accurate results, at the same
time, getting you a better, more targeted exposure
to your prospective customers.


What Can We Do to Optimize Your Pages
More Effectively?

We use special software to analyze your web site
and compare it to the top ten web sites in your
industry. But how do these guys get to the top of
the search results? Well, there is no magic. It takes time, hard work and perseverance. But if a web site does get into the top ten, they are doing something right!

We will conduct an in-depth analysis based on your web pages and the web pages of your competitors
and generate personalized recommendations for
you based on our findings. Now since this is only
part of the whole internet marketing plan, this will
not guarantee you the top ten spot, but it will give
you a definite advantage with the search engines.


Search Engine Submissions

When you submit your web site URL to a search engine, you basically ask the search engine
spiders to visit your web site and to evaluate it. If
the search engine spiders cannot find anything
useful on your site, they won't list your web site, or
it will be listed on position 16,569 or worse. With a listing on that position, you are not very likely to
get any visitors.

The underlining point we are trying to make is, it doesn't make sense to submit your web site again
and again if it isn't search engine ready.

We do submissions on a monthly basis, any more frequently and you may be considered a spammer trying to flood the search engines. What this does
in reality is once a month we tell the search
engines to visit your site again because you might
have new information that was not there before.
And if you do, in fact update you web site on a
regular basis, your web site be more likely to get a higher ranking with the search engines.


The Basis of Link building is Link Popularity

Even before Google came on the scene, link
popularity was being used by one or two search engines as part of their equation when determining
the rankings for any given search term. Then when Google arrived with their link-based Page Rank,
link popularity took off and became an absolute
essential ingredient in achieving top rankings. Link popularity is the number and quality of other web
sites that link to yours.

The "quality" here generally means three things:

• Links must be relevant to your site's theme
• Links should come from other high ranking sites
• Links' anchor (clickable part) should target your keywords

Some people believe that the more links there are,
the higher your ranking will be. However, that is
only partially true. The search engines (and those
that program them) are not dumb. They are used to
search engine spammers trying to cheat their way
into getting a high ranking. Because of this, the
search engines are not just looking for the number
of links that point to a site, but the quality of those
links as we just outlined above.

Let's go over this again, the idea behind link
popularity is that the more quality pages that link to your page, the more important your page is and it, therefore, deserves a higher ranking than it would otherwise have. This is one of the most important factors that help ALL search engines (not only
Google) to determine your site's relevance for a
search phrase.


Inbound Links

Some engines simply counted the number of links coming into a page (inbound links), but Google took
the idea a step further. Each inbound link comes
from a page which itself has inbound links. The
more inbound links on the linking page, the more important that page is and, therefore, the more important the link to your page is.

So Google gives more weight to inbound links from important pages that it does to inbound links from lesser pages. They call the idea "Page Rank".


Blogging Your Way To The Top

A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but
occasionally spelled web log or weblog) is a
web-based publication made up mostly of periodic articles, usually showing earlier ones first. The term blog is a blend of the terms web and log, leading to
web log, weblog, and finally blog.

Creating a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an
article to an existing blog is called blogging. A
person who posts these entries is called a blogger.
Ok enough of the basics. What can it do for you?

Blogs are the current craze of the search engine
marketing world. They are the natural link
attractors, easy to update with new content and
tend to draw quality traffic more quickly than
traditional web site pages. That's why many
online business owners are so intrigued by them
and are looking to learn more about how to get
started. Contact us if you want to learn more about blogging or any other part of the Search Engine Optimization process.