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SEO 1: Introduction to SEO
Have you ever wondered why search queries on the web will usually yield names, web sites, companies, or expressions that are well-known - such as"MacDonald's" - as opposed to "Uncle Joe's Diner"?
Did you ever put up a web site and hoped - in vain - for a lot of visits and a high Google ranking?
There could be many reasons why your web site (... we hope you have one ; if you don't, contact the Powwwerpages team for assistance) isn't attracting enough traffic. The main reason is most likely that it
hasn't been Search Engine Optimized ! This might be a simplification but is most likely true.
After such a bold statement, a definition of Search Engine Optimization is in order. So, what's SEO ?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is (to put it very dryly and scientifically) the sum of strategies, tactics, methods (and yes, tricks !) used by webmasters to maximize and improve their web site's search result position on the major web-crawling Search Engines (Yahoo, Google, etc.), or their web ranking on Google.
For Wikipedia’s definition of SEO, click here.
Important: Search result position is not the same as page ranking. Position is simply the place that a search result is allocated on the result page (for example, number 3 which is excellent, or 63,000 which is pathetic, on any major search engine). Page ranking ("PR") is, on a scale of 1 - 10 only, the importance or grading which Google (and, at this point, no other engines) will ascribe to a given web page.
Most sites, millions of them, have a PR of zero, or maybe 1 - if they are lucky. Page rankings of 4-5 are already considered very good. There are very few web sites with a PR of 10 and even Google's home page itself has only PR 9. The US government's official site, www.usa.gov , is one of the rare PR 10 birds.
The subtleties and implications of PR will be discussed in future SEO newsletters.
Less dryly and more bluntly put, we can define SEO simply as “the science of getting Search Engines to position or rank your web site higher.”
A list of those above-mentioned strategies and tactics (never mind the tricks ...) would fill, and indeed has filled, whole libraries and will be described in upcoming free newsletters and reports.
And what have all the above definitions of PR and positioning and web-crawling search engines to do with the
US Yellow Pages Industry, B2B / B2C Yellow Pages, Business Directories , businesses and users?
A lot . Learn more on the next page.
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