}--SEO FAQ's

Q-What is a Search Engine Spider?
Search engines use software to gather information about your website. This software examines the code of your website, looks for links pointing to your site, and also at who you link to. This software is called many names, usually search engine crawlers, robots, or most commonly, spiders - because they crawl the "web" - search engine optimization experts don't always get the best puns to work with!

Q-How Will Search Engine Optimization Help Me?
You might have a great looking website, but what use is that if you get no visitors? It is important to ensure that all your important pages contain good quality text that can be read by search engine spiders. Targetted strong SEO quality content is an extremely important part of your search engine marketing strategy. Search engine optimization gives your business to compete as effectively as possible in your online market.

Improvements in search engine placement cannot be gained simply through registering your URL. If you desire a coveted "front page" listing in the search engine results, then focused search engine optimization is necessary.

The ability of a search engine spider to find, analyse and rank your web site is based around a number of factors. Popular web animations based on products such as JavaScript or Flash can hide your content from the search engines and this can seriously affect your search engine rankings. Technologies such as Active Server Pages (ASP), JavaServer Pages (JSP), and elements contained within frames, can also result in poor search engine performance. The use of cookies, session variables, and non-standards-compliant HTML can also lead to you losing search engine positions.

Q-Automated Search Engine Optimization Software Will Not Help.
Despite what you might read on some so-called "expert" sites, there are no software products available that can automate the search engine optimization process. Automated search engine submission is not an effective search engine optimization strategy, but a misguided and pointless exercise. Search engines will find your site naturally through the links pointing to it so there is no need to constantly resubmit your site to ensure that it is spidered. However the search engine optimization process will allow your site to compete better than all the other sites in your field that are indexed by search engine spiders.

Q-What is Link Popularity?
The theory goes something like this: The search engine Powers That Be have decided that if other sites are linking to your site, it must be a winner; therefore, it deserves a boost in rankings (when all else is equal). If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. People link to good sites, not bad ones.

Q-Is Link Popularity Important?
Yes. Search engines have a hard job when it comes to providing your search results. They attempt to give you the best and most relevant links that are contained in their database. The problem that the search engines have is how to decide which web sites are best, which they basically do by contrasting relevancy with popularity. To determine relevancy they look at a number of factors, such as your title tag. To determine the popularity of your web site they look at how many links point to you. Most search engines work on the assumption that the more links a web site has pointing towards it, the better it must be. A link pointing towards you can be seen as a vote in favour of your web site.

Q-PageRank Does Not Equal Link Popularity.
It's important to note that Google PageRank is not the same thing as link popularity. PR is actually a subset of link popularity. Whereas PR focuses strictly on the quantity and popularity of links, link popularity adds a "quality factor" into the equation. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly use the terms "link popularity" and "PageRank " interchangeably, which has served to confuse the issue further.

All major search engines place some emphasis on link popularity in their ranking algorithms. There appear to be 2 main types of links that work best to increase your link popularity: links from other sites that focus on the same keyword phrases your site focuses on, and links from relevant categories in major directories and industry-specific portals. "Free-for-all" (FFA) sites do not constitute quality links, so don't waste your $20.00 submitting your site to 1000 of search engines. Links from sites that focus on topics that have nothing to do with your site probably won't help you win any link popularity contests, either (although they may temporarily boost your PR).


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