Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing: They Really ARE Rocket Science!

* It takes a minimum of three to six months, very hard work and many hours to get ranked.

* It’s imperative to understand how spiders work. Spiders are programs that crawl all over the Web, automatically sucking up stories and URLs and adding them to the giant, ever-expanding encyclopedia of Internet content. Ranking criteria: relevancy, freshness of content and unique value. If spiders detect one or more of these, they will be back every three days. If nothing new shows up for a while, they come back every 10 days. If still nothing new, they don’t come back at all. Spiders recognize words—ideally profitable keywords — not images. Flash is death on a landing page; if it takes eight seconds to load, forget it. For spiders to return, it is imperative to create keyword-focused content — pages with 250 words of copy. That means you should create at least one press release a quarter and ideally one a month. Write a blog. Become a member of a forum or community that gets readers back to your site. (But avoid overt contextual plugs.) If you can get people to mention your site and include a hyperlink, that is an implied testimonial. Spiders like that lots.