Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

No other book explains how to create a search-engine friendly web sites. Shari is famous for understanding how to incorporate search engine optimization in a site from the very beginning.

Search Engine Visibility ties web site design, site usability, and search engine marketing with long term business goals. The book focuses on quality, qualified web site traffic, not a large volume of hits that do not benefit a firm's bottom line.

Also, Search Engine Visibility is the best practices book on search engine marketing.

PPC is much like advertising, and are those links that come up when you enter a keyword in a search field. Also known as sponsored links or recommended links, the advertiser pays a fee to the search engine every time it is clicked on. PFI is more like paying for a web site to immediately be considered for indexing. Using PPC and PFI can significantly increase the number of visitor you get. You can help you with both.

If you spend enough time looking at search engine results, eventually it will occur to you that sites seem to be ranked in part based upon the length of time they have existed. It can appear that older sites tend to rank higher than newer sites, and one can be tempted to conclude that age is a factor in the search engine algorithms.

Yes, most search engines, including Google, look at your ALT tags when indexing your Web page. For many sites, particularly image-heavy sites, ALT text is one of the few elements available for the search engines to index. If your page has no text at all on it, it can still get a high search engine placement by using ALT text.

Though meta keywords tags are not a major factor search engines consider when ranking sites, they should not be left off the page. Both the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag contribute to your search engine ranking. A meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief and concise list of the most important themes of your page. The meta keywords tag takes the following form:

<meta name="keywords" content="keywords,keyword,keyword phrase,etc.">

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. They take a variety of forms and serve a variety of purposes, but in the context of search engine optimization when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag.

The simple and direct answer to the second part of the question is that you should not use hidden text. You may be able to trick the search engines for a brief period of time by hiding keyword stuffed sentences on your page, but you will risk having your site permanently banned from the search engines. As we state on our SEO Services page, search engine optimization is not a process of manipulating or tricking the search engines.

Search engine optimization is the practice of guiding the development or redevelopment of a website so that it will naturally attract visitors by winning top ranking on the major search engines for selected search terms and phrases.

In the search engine world, spam is defined as the manipulation of a web page to give it an artificial boost in the search engine rankings. Generally, spam is what the search engines say it is. I.e., it is defined by the search engines themselves. Each of the major search engines provide specific guidelines describing what webmasters should and should not do to their web pages in order to achieve a better search engine ranking, though that has not always been the case.

Hidden text is textual content which your visitors cannot see, but which is still readable by the search engines. The idea is to load a Web page with keywords and keyword phrases that would be unsightly to visitors but that would improve the page's rankings in the search engine results, and to do so without letting your visitors see the text. Hidden text is identified as search spam by each of the major search engines.

There were 2,970,000,000 web pages indexed by Netcraft as of February 2007, and 70,392,567 websites were indexed by Yahoo! as of August 2005. These are the most recent figures:the longer or later on in the year it goes there will be more websites so you could check it one day and then the next day check and 1000 more sites could be up

Google announced on 7/25/2008 that it had indexed over 1 trillion unique URL's.

Every day, more sites get created. That means this answer will change fairly rapidly over short periods of time.

The amount of time you will have to wait will depend on which techniques are employed in your efforts to optimize your website. Assuming you've rebuilt your site and loaded it onto your server, replacing the old files, you need to be prepared to wait anywhere from a few days (if you use a pay-for-inclusion service) to a few months.

If your site has already been on the Web for some time, and is already listed in all of the major directories, then you will probably begin to see improvements in your search engine rankings within 4-6 weeks.

Google is by far the most used search engine today. In addition to providing Web search at its home page, Google.com, Google also provides web search results to several of the most popular Internet destinations, including Yahoo! [Note: As of 02/18/2004, Yahoo! no longer uses Google as its default search engine.] and AOL. Google does far more than 200 million (>200,000,000) searches every day through Google.com. That number was reported by Google all the way back in 2001, and they have consistently refused to update it, but you can be assured that Google does substantially more than 200,000,000 searches every day through Google.com.