1. Why is search important?

1.1. Search was essentially the panacea that, if harnessed effectively, would drive sustainable
waves of targeted traffic to your website, and ultimately generate more revenue for your business.
1.2. For customers, search engines offer a convenient way for them to sift through the literally
billions of pages out there to find valuable, relevant information on what they are interested in at
any given time.
1.3. For marketers, search engines offer a unique opportunity to get their products or services in
front of online prospects at the exact moment they are looking for them.
1.4. There is only one real tactic that most SEOs see as sustainable long term, which is to build
relevance to your site and focus on providing a resource for your customers.
2. What is a search engine, and how does it work?
2.1. Search engines are interested in delivering timely, relevant, high-quality search results to
their users.
2.2. To deliver accurate, relevant, high-quality search results to their users, search engines need to
gather detailed information about the billions of web pages out there. They do using automated
programmes called “bots” aka “spiders”, which they send out to “crawl” the web. Spiders follow
hyperlinks and gather information about the pages that they find. => KEYWORD: relevance.
3. How big is search?
4. How do I optimize my website for the search engines?
4.1. Want to attract search engine traffic? Don’t make things complicated for search engines to
index your website. Index is a massive database storing details about pages’ contents, links both
into and out of it.
4.2. Spiders are interested in text, not the graphics, animations and other flashy bells and whistles
that web designers use to make sites look pretty.
4.3. SPIDER TRAPS:

Website features Why it is bad for SEO?

All flash website(using animations) Difficult for spiders to crawl

Javascript navigation spiders don’t activate Javascript code

Frames

image maps and other non-text navigation

4.4. The starting point for effective SEO is knowing keywords or keyword phrases.
They are the words or phrases that people are typing into when why want to look for your
products or services or information.
4.5. Choosing effective keywords.
+ Step1: Figuring out what is your target audience.
+ Step2: Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes (potential audiences’ shoes). Ask yourself:
What would I type into the box if I want to know about those products or services? Make
a list of those.
 + Step3: When you have those “seed” keywords, type them into engines and look at the
results. Examine the sites that are highly for your chosen keywords. Analyse them and try
to work out how they are achieving those rankings.
+ Step4: Learn to use automated keyword suggestion tools such as GoogleAdWords
(http://bit.ly/googkwtool) and on the SEO book website
(http://bit.ly/UDMSEOBook) ,etc. These tools provide insight into the search traffic
volumes for the most popular phrases relating to seed keyword phrases you provide.
4.6. Analyze the competition.
+ Using SEO Toolset and Comptete.
4.7. NEXT STEP after initial keyword lists.
+ Step1: Narrow your initial list down to a more manageable size.
+ Step2: Balance long-tail and short-tail keywords:
4.8. Short-tail keywords are simple one-or-two word phrases, very general, highly
competitive, have a high cost per click, low conversion rates. For example: “hotel”,
“cheap hotel”
4.9. Long-tail keywords are not so competitive, often consist of 4, 5 or more words, have
a lower cost per click and have a higher conversion rate. For example: “cheap city centre
hotel in Hanoi”
Focusing on highly specific long-tail search terms is likely to yield a higher ROI for PPC.
5. CONTENT_ The most important thing on your site
+ In the context of SEO, content is all about texts.
6. LINKS_ second only to content
6.1.