Even if you know a fair amount about search engine optimization, or SEO, you may have questions. Because search engine optimization is an evolving technology, it pays to stay on top of the industry. As a virtual assistant and search engine optimization specialist, I get asked a lot of times about how the search engines work.

Here are the answers to the most common SEO questions that I receive:

SEO Question 1. What are text links?

Answer: Text links are links that contain only text. The links are contained within a sentence and when a reader clicks on them, they are taken to a different page on the same website.  Generally, the text included in the link is called anchor text and it’s a great way to optimize the keywords on your page and link to an external or internal webpage.

SEO Question 2. What are link farms and link exchanges?

Answer: They’re bad news. While links to your website are important for a good page ranking, search engine spiders don’t accept just any old link. The link has to be from a relevant and quality website. A link farm is a Web page designed to profit from linking to web pages and Google and the other major search engines will penalize you for participating, paying, for links.

Link exchanging is essentially a link trade, “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” It’s okay to do this in small doses as long as the website you’re trading links with is relevant to your website. If your website sells dog-training products and you’re trading links with a furniture website then the search engines are going to discount the link.

SEO Question 3. What is latent semantic indexing?

Answer: When search engines find a keyword or keyword phrase on a webpage, they automatically search for other related words and phrases they would reasonably expect to see.  For example if you’re writing an article on snowboarding the spiders may also search for boarding, riding, skiing, free riding and so on.

If the search engine spiders find these related words or phrases they have more confidence the primary keyword is being used in context, and therefore they will judge the page as more relevant.

LSI has been an active part of search engine ranking for a few years and as more and more content is published online, it’s becoming more important for webmasters to recognize it and make use of it when writing their content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is part science and part art. The science comes from understanding the technology involved in meeting and understanding the search engine algorithms. The art, creating valuable content that includes your sometimes awkward keywords and keyword phrases. As your business grows and your web pages and content increase, you’ll want to stay on top of this ever changing practice.

I hope that these answers are helpful to your SEO questions. To learn more about SEO you can click here get a FREE copy of my eBOOK 10 Things Your Virtual Assistant Must Do For Your Website To Be Found Online.