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is analyzed and then modified to increase your web site’s rank on the
search engines, like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Your web site’s
ranking on a key word search is essential to directing traffic to your
site, and proper SEO ensures that your web site is available to the
search engines.
In a keyword search, search engines in particular send out what are
called web crawlers, also known as spiders, or robots (bots). “Web
crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for
later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded
pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for
automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or
validating HTML code.”
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Companies can invest tens of thousands of dollars on a web site, but if
it has not been properly optimized for the search engines, then your
web site will not be found nor will it be indexed. If your web site is not
indexed, then your money will be spent in vain because web crawlers
will simply bypass your site in a keyword search. If you are not
investing in good search engine optimization for your company’s web
site, not only will you lose exposure via web traffic, you will also lose
money. SEO ensures accessibility to the search engines.
In order for your company to have success on the Web, hiring
professionals to optimize your site is a vital marketing strategy that
will increase your online presence, for businesses and nonprofits alike.
Not only will proper optimization improve your ranking on the search
engines, your company will also benefit in all the free advertising a
higher-ranking web site experiences.

                                                            
2
 Wikipedia 
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You should be just as competitive when optimizing your company’s
web site as you are in your day-to-day business activities. Statistics
show that internet users rarely, if at all, go beyond the third page when
doing a key word search. This means that your site rank is essential to
directing traffic to your site because your competitors are literally just
a click away.
Understanding the importance of search engine optimization, Google
has created a set of guidelines to consider.
Design and content guidelines:
• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page
should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the
important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or
so links, you may want to break the site map into separate
pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that
clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and
make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names,
content, or links. The Google crawler does not recognize text
contained in images.
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• Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and
accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a
“?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider
crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep
the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer
than 100).
The authors of this text co-own and operate a consultancy called
SEO.com and an SaaS (software as a service) software company called
Yield Software that are renowned leaders in search engine
optimization.
Finding What You Need Online

You need to know how to access the information you need online as
quickly and efficiently as possible. “Boolean” is one way to bolster
your Internet wisdom. This silly word represents a very easy and
powerful method of finding what you need on the Internet.
For example, merely adding quote marks (“…..”), or (+) and (-) signs
in front of some of the words in a Google search will dramatically
improve your search results, thereby providing access to many of the
most valuable and pertinent online resources in seconds, and at no
cost.
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Please see the following link to learn easy tips for powerful searching:
www.google.com/intl/en/help/refinesearch.html

After you retrieve good quality search results, you should select the
most relevant links to “drill down” on and then scan the results. If you
read the domain/URL that comes up under each search result link
before you click on it, there will be hints on the relevancy of the
information and its source. Generally, longer URLs are more likely to
link to “ad-centric” content than shorter URLs, which often have good
quality content.
Review many potential information sources from the results of your
Boolean Internet search; as a result, you will have a better chance at
finding those most pertinent. Drill down on the most promising links
to read, print out, bookmark, keep notes on, and upon which to focus.
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Furthermore, you should set up a free account at Furl.net, digg, reddit,
del.icio.us, or similar social tagging and networking services to
organize your bookmarks and share with others on the Internet as
desired. Keep an eye out for Favorites.com and Bookmarks.com too.
Here is one example of a collection of social bookmarks from Furl:
www.furl.net/member/microman
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If you seek to simplify the URLs that you email people or save, you
can freely and easily create a short URL as a replacement at
TinyURL.com or other places. The author of this guide uses TinyURL
daily along with the aforementioned tools.
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