What is SEO?
You have probably heard of SEO since it is a very effective form of advertising your website. For those who don’t know, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to your site by designing site content that rakes high with the search engines. Where your site ranks in a web search is critical to the chances that “traffic” will be directed to your site.
How do Search Engines work?
Although, each search engine uses a unique proprietary algorithm (in other words a computer program that calculates ranking of sites), they all generally follow the same method. First, a search engine will send out a “spider” to fetch as many documents as it can. Then another program reads these documents and “indexes” them based on the words they contain. Therefore, only meaningful results are returned for each keyword or words used for the search. These indexers compute the keyword density in order to establish the relevancy of your site to the keyword search. Keyword density basically refers to how often a certain word appears in any given document.
If I have an affiliate web site and have no control of my keywords, meta-tags and other site content, should I still submit my affiliate URL?
Absolutely! Chances are the web designer for your affiliate program site is much more versed in designing a web site for this purpose than your “typical” internet marketer designing their own site. Although no one really knows for sure the exact formula search engines uses to rank sites, the consensess by most internet experts is that the search engines look more for keyword content than anything else. For instance, if you are an affiliate marketer that has a web site that sells “vitamins”, chances are your affiliate site contains the word “vitamins” more than you think as it is a very important keyword relevant to your site. Therefore, if someone searches the word vitamins, your site would be included in the results of the search. The bad news is you are also competing with all other sites on the internet that contain the keyword vitamin.
Is it worth submitting my website URL to search engines?
If you are interested in another means of driving traffic to your site, then “yes”. Just think of submitting your URL to the search engines as “advertising” to the search engines. The more “visible” your site is with the search engines, the easier it is for the search engine to gather the information on your site and place you before another relevant site. This, of course, leads to a higher page ranking which gives your site a higher percentage of receiving a “hit”.
And if you find a web site that offers Free website submission, such as www.stevenbrubaker.net, why not?
