Well, to explain basics SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website for search engines. When you search for a specific topic the search engine returns a number of pages in a specific order. That order is not random, it is ordered by the search engines ranking algorithm. Every Search engine has its own algorithm that is kept in secret. But there are official guidelines that help SEO masters understand how they should improve websites for better visibility.

How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you need to learn about SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren’t. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by e piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts will not be rewarded. But there is nothing you can do about it, so just keep quiet.

What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you’d better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. – in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

SEO as a marketing strategy

SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals.[45] A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic, achieved through optimization techniques and not paid advertising, to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate

SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. (Some trading sites such as eBay can be a special case for this; it will announce how and when the ranking algorithm will change a few months before changing the algorithm). Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.  A top-ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org has suggested, “Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines.” Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites.

The post What is SEO? first appeared on 7loops blog.

Is this really the dream you want to come true?

You have to ask yourself is that car, house really worth all of the sacrifices you have to make in order to get this things. But an even better question would be, is this the only way I can afford all those things. Is there no better way to do this?

Time is Money

Time is money is an old saying and it is absolutely true. What god is it if you have a lot of money and no time? The lack of time is often followed by stress, lack of health, depression. Your social life suffers and you feel lonely. And the most important thing is you are actually not happy. If you are not happy then this can’t be your dream and only money can’t make you happy. Of course there are probably a lot of people who really enjoy their job and would disagree with me but I am speaking from my point of view and I know I am not the only one who thinks like this.

So if time is money and we want more money we can’t afford to sacrifice time for money as we gain nothing with this trade. The only reasonable way to make more money is to earn more in the same time or even better to earn more in less time.

But how can we earn more money in less time?

Well that is the biggest question so far. There are of course many ways to do this and even more ways to fail at this. The most important thing I would say is to do things you are passionate about. Only when you do something you are passionate about you will give your best and only when you give all you can give will you be able to make more money in less time. I know this is a very simple advice but lot of people forget it all the time. I hear it all the time “If I could only do what I love to do”. I would say that whatever you are passionate about you can make a living with it if you try hard enough and make it happen.

What I want to say with all this is that your dreams can’t be just the things you desire but the whole process how you get to really enjoy the things you want. You can deeply enjoy your life only when you are truly happy with yourself with what you do and when you have the time to enjoy it. Everything else must only be a consequence of your success, and only then you will be able to say “I achieved my Dream!”.

The post How to achieve your dreams? first appeared on 7loops blog.

1.    Be better than competition

Does this mean that I have to be better than anybody else in my business? Well of course not. There can be only one who is the best and we all know that there are a lot of people who make money even in small niche businesses. So what does this mean then? It just means that you have to be better than the guy next door. Here are a few examples what you could do better.

• Specialize in a certain area where your competition is weak
• Offer faster completion times than competition
• Provide in-depth expertise on a certain topic
• Develop a reputation that you are the one that gets the job done no matter what
• And most important, be a leader in your field. For this to happen you have to gain experience and specific knowledge but this will be the main thing that will separate you from the rest

2.    Solve problems

You are hired for some purpose and the best thing you can do is to solve your customer’s problems and not make them worse. You won’t believe it but there are actually many people who cause more problems than they are solving and you don’t want to be one of them. Whatever you are doing, try to do it at your best. Don’t be sloppy! Take care of your customers. Sometimes you have to think for them and point out issues that they might have overlooked. You are the expert and you should act like one!

3.    Be profitable

This is probably the most important thing from this list. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how many customers you have or how satisfied they are if you are not profitable you will not be able to pay the bills and will be forced to shut down your business. So don’t be modest and charge your customers what is right. If you are worth it they will gladly pay it and if you are not than you are doing something wrong. Time is money even if it means only a couple of hours. I had a period once when a few of my friend asked me if I could help them at something. At first there was just a call here and a call there but the thing started to get annoying and I was wasting hours of my time every day just to help them out. I was tired and my other projects were suffering as a consequence of that and then I realized I have to make a stop to all of this. It is Ok to give advice but don’t waste your time when you have something else to do.

I know that just reading this won’t make you a successful business man / freelancer but this are the basics and I think that everyone has to know and follow this basic rules in order to succeed.

The post How to succeed in every business? first appeared on 7loops blog.