Why search?The key is “what do people want?” and “when do they want it?”.

If you are actively looking for a product / service, there is a very high chance that you would buy it, if someone is selling it at that right moment. Because it is what you want, you would even thank the seller for saving your time.

That is why “search” is so powerful. “Search” is the most powerful way for “selling”, because the consumer get “what they want when they want it“.

Why Search Engine Optimization?

The goal of internet is sharing knowledge for free. The goal of search engine is providing high quality content to people search the internet. Internet is the biggest knowledge base on earth, while search engine is the biggest distribution channel of knowledge on earth. Yahoo and Google serve billions of searches per day, that is millions of searches per hour. There are billions of web pages on the internet, how do search engines determine which web page is higher quality ?

1. How search engines know your web page exist?
2. Do search engines understand the meaning of the content on your web page?
3. How search engines know your web page is the one that consumer looking for?

Search engines are computer programs. Even the most advanced search engine like Google, it would NOT understand the content the same way a human does. If you don’t try your best to help search engine to understand your content, the search engine will NOT feel sorry for giving up just another web page. Even search engine find you web page, and “thinks” that your content is worth for consumers, meanwhile there are numerous contents on the internet, if you don’t try your best to show search engine that your content is very valuable, search engine will NOT feel sorry to rank your web page down.

On the other hand, because search engine is the biggest market place, people would fight for it. That is why search engine advertising took over all the other kind of advertising channels. All your competitors are optimizing their website for search engine, why not yours?

Is SEO powerful?

Yes, SEO is very powerful! It could help your website ranks well in search results. You can get incredible result.

I would like share one of the successful stories with you, you will see SEO is very powerful!

How Search Engine Optimization work?

Do you have any experience that you look for a product or service, but you could not find it? What do you do in order to get that product or service?

1. You think about if anyone providing it?
2. If there are someone providing it, how do you get it?
3. So, you would like to ask everyone you know, but in order to help you, your friends need to know what are you looking for…. How do you describe the thing that you are looking for?

On the other side, if you are a business owner, you are providing something or some services, what do you do to sell you products or services?

1. How do you know there is a market for your products / services?
2. If there is a demand for your products / services, how do you sell it?
3. So, you would like to tell everyone that you are providing a very wonderful product / service, how do you describe it so that people can easily understand what are you selling?

The goal of search engine optimization is helping search engines to fulfill their duty.

• help search engines finding your web page
• help search engines understanding your content better (in a machine to machine way)
• help search engines realizing the quality of your valuable content (in a fair way most of the time, but there are some black hat SEOers cheating)
• most importantly, help consumers to find your products or services, when they are looking for it

A simple SEO case study

One day, when I was reviewing my old projects, I found that one of my earliest customers was my aunt when I started my first internet business many years ago. I would like to thanks her for supporting me when I needed it most. So, I called her and asked if her website (www.chitart.com.hk) could be found on search engines? She said “NO, my website cannot be found on any search engine….” Then I told her that I would like to do SEO for her website for free. She asked me what SEO is? I told her: “Forget the technical terms, SEO will bring a lot of visitors to your website!”, so she agreed immediately.

Then, I told her to think of a few keywords and use those keywords to write an short article to describe her products. One hour later, I got her email with a short article. I noticed that she copied some content from her competitors’ websites.

As most search engine are sensitive to duplicated content, so I rewrite the article by changing the structure, modify the sequence of sentences and changed a few words to make the article more “search engine friendly” and prevent any “duplicated content penalty“. I put it online, and closely observe the result. After a few days…. wow ~~~ her website was listed on Google and Yahoo! Althought it was not listed as well as I wanted, but that is a great improvement already! Then, I changed a few more things, and observe the result again…

Here is search result from Google.com.hk, my aunt’s website shown on the 1st page! Ranked #3 out of 665,000 results!

Here is search result from Yahoo.com.hk, my aunt’s website shown on 1st page! Ranked #1 out of 169,100 results!

Sounds good to be ranked #1… so, what dose it means to you?

Can you believe that with SEO your website could rank higher than HALF A MILLION other competitors’ web pages?

As you can see, there are more than HALF A MILLION search results for that keyword on Google. And there are so many competitors paying a lot of money advertising on Yahoo and Google for that keyword (it could cost more than HK$150K per year for the top position ads).

People usually trust the top search results more than advertisements. The “click through rate” is much higher for the top search results compared to search engine advertisements. Getting the top search results would bring more visitors to your website than spending HK$150K per year on search engine advertisements.

This graph shows the traffic source to www.chitart.com.hk

As you would expect, most of the traffic to my aunt’s website is from search engines like Google and Yahoo now. I hope you are not one of my aunt’s competitors… if not, you may be very angry to see this graph now… because you spend so much on advertisements, but my aunt’s website get all the visitors.

SEO is a long term investment

In fact, search engines keep their algorithms as top trade secrets, there is no way to know the exact algorithms, not even their own employees. SEOers learn by “try and error” and actively observing the search results to deduce patterns and methodologies.

The key is continous learning and being creative!

Search engines update their algorithms all the time. That is why your website ranks differently over time. SEO experts must keep updated with the latest changes made by search engines, in order to keep their websites rank well.

It took me a long time to learn the SEO techniques. However, you CANNOT just learn from others, if everyone are doing the same things, your website would not rank better the others. In order to do well amoung tough competitions, you need a lot of creativities. Do something new that not many people noticed yet! Develop your own niches so that you can become a true expert.

The best way to learn is by helping people, that is why I create this website.

Wish you have a nice SEO day!