As a web professional, I am often asked by clients how they can appear on the first page of search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing.

Unfortunately there is no single trick, or magic wand that will put your website at the top of a search engine's results page (SERP). Be wary of any web site service that promises you first page results.

Understanding Search Engines

The purpose of a search engine is to provide quality information to people. It does this by finding all the websites in the world and indexing their contents. Try to imagine just how many web pages are in the world today. No amount of people could keep track of all of the web pages, let alone index their results.

Search engines use little computer programs to do this. These programs run like little robots and they require no human intervention. These robot programs are often called crawlers or spiders.

Crawlers visit a website, read the information on the actual site and also follow the links that the site connects to performing indexing on all the linked web sites. The crawler then returns this information to a central repository where the data is indexed.

Whenever you type words into Google/Yahoo!/Bing, you are actually searching through the index that they created. Keep in mind that each search engine has its own method of collecting and indexing web sites. This is why you can key the same words in Yahoo! and Google, and get different results on each page.

To determine what web pages are relevant to the words you just keyed in, an algorithm is used. An algorithm is a set of rules. Each search engine's algorithm is a closely guarded secret.

In a nut shell, that is how a search engine works. You can just imagine if word leaked out about an algorithm's details it would be exploited by some and the search results would soon become valueless to the search engine users.

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Key performance indicators (KPI) are the best means by which any website owner should be measuring Search Engine Optimization (SEO) success. Google tracks such info on their site. You can view data for your site by visiting Google Webmaster Tools.

So, what are the right KPIs to use when measuring how well the techniques and tactics actually work?

Before you begin digging deep into your analytics and working to understand the most essential SEO KPIs, recognize that their best use will ultimately be for learning what works and where a site/domain can be improved. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a master of analytics to understand these essential SEO KPIs

The Essential SEO KPIs

All sites are different, so the KPIs used to measure the success of an SEO campaign will vary by website.

• The Totals - Pages & Traffic: Perhaps the most straightforward of the essential KPIs for SEO, the total number of pages in search engine indices and the total amount of natural/organic traffic (and which way it is moving), are also the most obvious – and simplest to understand.
• Pages/Categories with the Most Traffic: Understanding which pages and categories already deliver the most search engine visitors provides SEOs and website owners with insights into what can be optimized (if not producing desired results) and which type of content can be expanded.
• Average Number of Keywords (and type) per Page: Discover how well developed the "long tail" is by determining the average number of keywords per landing page. It is also key to dig deeper to understand the popularity of the topics and information needs of users interested – explore the conversion rate for top keywords and identify areas of improvement.
• Length of Keyword Queries: Knowing the length of the keyword queries is a key indicator of the performance of long-tail SEO campaigns. Knowing the average number of words per query helps decision-makers understand the characteristics of the traffic.
• Bounce Rate per Search Engine / Keyword: Search engines tend to have different demographic user profiles. Taking this into consideration when analyzing bounce rate per keyword may help to understand how the website content is perceived by these different segments of people. Bounce rates on the keyword level specifically tell a lot about the quality of the keyword analysis phase.
• Average Length of Visit / Visit Duration: Both the duration and the average length of visits are high-quality benchmarks for organic/natural traffic.
• New Visitors / User Loyalty: This is another essential key performance indicator for SEO as it provides information on the characteristics of the organic traffic. The rate or percentage of new visitors is particularly important for community-based websites and shows if SEO is in line with other business and marketing goals.

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Link development for small business

Link development is the practice of improving the position of your website in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Basically, link development isn't the same as link building. Unlike traditional practices of acquiring links – any links – by whatever means necessary, link development is based on strategy to build organic backlink growth.

The quality of the website linking to your site improves your page ranking. Also, site placement matters because links that are part of the content are more valuable than footer links or blogroll links.

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