Luke Hubbard

Search Engine Optimization, often called SEO, is the art of gaining high rankings in search engine results. Search engines rank results based on three basic principles: linking, content, and architecture.

Luke Hubbard Ponders SEO in Paris

Linking is by far the most important aspect of SEO. Gaining a link is a statement that your site provides value and someone finds it useful. If your site gets a lot of quality links, then it shows the search engines that others find your site relevant and useful. Note that a link from a high-quality website will make more of an impact on your rank than tons of links from trash sites. Also, relevancy from the linking website is also considered. For instance, since my website is generally about Internet marketing & advertising, a link from AdAge would probably impact my search engine ranking more than a link from icanhascheezburger.com.

Content is the actual text, images, videos, or whatever else that’s on the site. Obviously, strong content provides value and thus will gain links. it is important to keep content focused on an overall theme in order for robots and humans to understand what your site is about and to find it useful.

Architecture is becoming a less important part of SEO as technology evolves as it concerns both web masters and search engines. Web masters have better tools to keep their sites clean and well constructed. The search engines are becoming smarter and overcoming obstacles that used to give them problems such as identifying and reading inline frames.

One way to see how Google views the value on your site is to check its page rank, an algorithm that assigns a number value between 1-10 to web pages. You can check a website’s page rank using the tool below.

Remember, a “10″ is a perfect score and Google doesn’t give out many of them. Check out the ranks for Google, MSN, Apple, NewYorkTimes.com, and PerezHilton.com for fun.

If you are new to search engine marketing (SEM), you may be asking “Which Search Engine should I launch first?” or “Which search engine will have the best ROI?”

If you’re a relatively small advertiser, meaning you’re not working with an advertising agency, then set-up your accounts in this order: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com. If you are working with an advertising agency, they’ll probably launch all 4 at once and you have nothing to worry about.

Google Adwords
First, sign-up for Google Adwords as it has the easiest system to use. Search engine marketing is extremely complex, but Google has done the best job so far in making it easy for small advertisers to get an account up and running. Adwords has the largest market share of all the search engines and also has the most refined algorithm.

Because Google is the friendliest system to use, and because it has the largest market share, there is more competition for high rankings and possibly higher Cost-per-Clicks (CPCs) for your ads. All in all, don’t let this hinder you from signing up as Google does an excellent job at showing ads to a relevant audience. Some of your keyword CPCs may be slightly higher on Google, but they’ll be to a targeted audience and hopefully provide a solid ROI.

The last reason to launch with Google first is Google’s free Analytics tool and tracking capabilities. For all you numbers geeks out there, you’ll absolutely love drowning yourself in data. Google gives you as little or as much data as you want so have fun digging deep into the numbers for hours on end.

Note that by signing up on Google and staying opted in to their partner search listings, your ads will automatically show on AOL and Ask.com.

Yahoo Search Marketing
Second, launch on Yahoo as it provides solid results and has a user friendly system named “Panama.” Yahoo is second to Google in market share and has also done an excellent job at refining their algorithm to show relevant advertising results. An optimized Yahoo campaign will provide fantastic marketing for your company.

MSN Microsoft Adcenter
You’d think that Microsoft would have dominated the search marketing space by now, but unfortunately their market share has consistently lagged behind Google and Yahoo. MSN will provide you will far less volume that Google and Yahoo, but will usually provide a stronger ROI. The reason is simple; there is less competition on MSN and lower CPCs. Keep in mind that MSN’s system isn’t quite as easy to use as Google or Yahoo. Also, don’t expect to get massive results from this engine as the search volume simply isn’t there.

Ask Sponsored Listings
The last engine to launch is Ask.com. The main reason is simply because if you launch on Google and opt into their partner network, you’ll automatically show on Ask.com. Ask provides a solid experience for consumers, but their advertising platform is not uniform to the other three search engines. A beginner will find the system more difficult to use. Also, the ROI results are often strong, but come in last place compared to the other search engines in general.

On a final note, keep in mind that SEM in general will be your most efficient advertising medium. If you are a small company with limited dollars to spend in advertising, I say go first to SEM.

Wondering where to go to submit your website to the search engines?

To have your website crawled by the search engine spiders, so that it begins to show up in search engine results, simply go to each of the links below. Each link will ask you to submit your site URL such as http://www.lukehubbard.com

Note that the following three search engines make up over 90% of all search engine traffic. Do NOT get ripped off and pay someone to submit your site to all the thousands of small search engines. If your site is well optimized and offers value, it will begin to show up in those search engines anyway. In fact, if you have a fantastic site, you don’t even need to submit it to the links below as chances are that the search engines will find you anyway. However, if you’re a new site and want to ensure that you’ll get found by the search engine crawlers, then go to each of the links below.

Submit URL to Google

Add site to Yahoo

Submit site to MSN