Movin' On Up!

Search engine optimization is pretty much self explanatory. It is the process of attempting to get your site ranked higher in the listings returned for a search. Optimization can be done in a variety of ways.

1. One way is to simply pay to have your site sponsored on the search. This is done using Google's Adsense and various other search engine marketing programs. Website owners can create an account, and pick which keywords best fit their site, and how much they are willing to pay for those keywords. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher up in the sponsored listings you will be. Website owners do not pay anything unless the link is actually clicked upon.

2. Another method is through the use of Meta tags. These tags go into the header of your html code, and basically tell a search engine the description, and some keywords for your site. If your site is scanned during a search, and the search engine recognizes a keyword, your site will be returned. There are several components to Meta tags such as: site description, keywords, document type, and copyright. Description and keywords are the most commonly used. This is cheaper, because it is free to add Meta tags.

3. Another thing that site owners can do is actually manually submit their sites to be included in the search engine crawlers. Owners would have to go to each search engine individually, and manually submit their link to be included. This is also free.

4. There are also websites such as AddMe that you can pay to do the above mentioned method for you. For a small price they will add your website to hundreds of search engines on the web. The more sites linking to your site, the better chance you have of showing up higher on the search results list.

5. Linking is very important. If there are several sites linking to your url, the higher up your website will be. The more connections your site has with the rest of the world wide web, the better off you are.