Page 46 - Payout Magazine Online Volume 8.0

hile it’s true Search Engine Optimization is
WNOT the end-all and be-all for getting major
amounts of traffic, it Is the basis of effective, long-
term Search Engine Marketing and as such should
never be ignored.

You can buy or otherwise get many links in to your
site and content and come away much enriched.
But that might only be a short-run endgame if
you don’t have proper optimization on your site.
If you’re in it for the long term, get more than
just traffic from those links; get a reverberating,
accurate search engine echo that will allow SEs
to “remember” your content because it was more
than a volume source.

Properly, simply and cleanly optimized website
content will add more long-term value to each
click you buy or otherwise acquire (through link
exchanges or comments or other off-site inbound
access points).

Now when you see the advertisements and
articles and other sources talking about SEO,
it often comes off as a very deep, technical and
almost mystical process.

And, you know, it can be. But it can also be
very simple, and often the simplest is the most
effective means to an end. At any rate there are
things that any near-newbie and fairly familiar site
owner and operator (or hired webmaster) can do
which will instantly improve the site in question’s
search engine rankings.

Now one thing you must remember about search
engines: to them, content is text, content is stuff
that can be read by people. SEs don’t care about
fancy or beautiful graphics, esthetics in any sense
QUAlIFY that it’s indicated what the visual material material
other than it can be downloaded/viewed fast and

is in the use of appropriate “alt” tags.

YOUR BOOBS: 1. use Media Properly

Having said the above, remember that using
lots of visual material is good. This is referred
to as making your content “media rich” because
A Search Engine it could be illustrations, graphs, photos, videos,
and anything that supports and complements your
textual stuff.
Optimization Primer One is that it informs the bot or crawler what is
Using the “alt” is important for several reasons.

in the visual. Second is that the alt (which is an
attribute, though it’s commonly called a tag for
some reason) is used by screen readers, allowing

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