Discover The Answers To The Top 10 SEO Questions

 By Jeremy Gislason

Owning any type of online business will strongly benefit from a few SEO techniques. However, everyone and their brother has advice on how to do it. All this 'expert' advice can make the simple task of optimizing your site incredibly confusing.

Here are some straightforward answers to the most common SEO questions.

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. A search engine is a tool many internet users use to find sites that are relevant to their needs. The three biggies when it comes to search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are however, hundreds of search engines available to internet users. Search engines work by sending out spiders to crawl through the World Wide Web and gather information. If you have the information they're looking for, in the places they are looking, they'll find you and place you in their results when a person is looking for your information.

The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your website and in your content, is the essence of search engine optimization. So now you might be asking…what do search engines look for and where do they look for it? The answer is keywords and links. Keywords in your html coding, keywords on your web page content, keywords in your content, and the number of incoming links you have to your website.

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Home Page Essentials: Five Questions Every Home Page Should Answer

We’ve noticed a disturbing trend in home page design -- information overload. Web designers and developers seem to have resolved the "to click or to scroll?" controversy by loading everything onto the home page. "More and more and more is better," they seem to be saying.

But, to our mind, home page overload creates more problems than it solves. When there’s too much information on the home page, users can’t process it. It’s similar to driving down the highway (the real one, not the information one) and being inundated by so many billboards that you miss the one sign you’re actually looking for.

We understand how home page overload happens. An e-commerce developer wants to use the home page to announce every product the company sells. Or dueling departments within a company fight for home page real estate. And advertisements produce revenue! It’s often easier to put everything on the home page than to make tough editorial choices.

Overloading the home page may quiet your colleagues, but it’s a disservice to your site visitors who then have the frustrating task of sorting through and processing the information. And, as we all know, frustrated site visitors don’t stick around to figure things out; they simply click off overloaded home pages.

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What Do You Want From Your Website?

By Karen Lotter

This is the first question I ask a potential client when they invariable ask me, “how much does a website cost?”

That’s when I ask them “what do you want from your website; what do you want it to do for you?” As I see them trying to ask about cost again I quickly get in, “who do you want to talk to, and what do you want to say.”

Hopefully by this time they realise that this is one of those “how long is a piece of string- questions?”

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