Search Engine Optimization

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Brief Introduction to SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the rage nowadays. If you've never heard of it, you must have been living in a cave all this while, haven't you? Anyway, to help those who don't know what search engine optimization is (a.k.a SEO), it's the art and science of getting your webpages and websites to rank higher on the search engines (more specifically Google).

Whenever you do a search on Google (or Yahoo or MSN for that matter), organic results from the search engine are shown to you. These are known as SERPs (search engine result pages). Rankings are based mainly on a couple of factors and we'll have a look at them shortly. Also, you'll see an example in quite a bit ...

Search Engine Optimization can be classed into 2 branches. They are known as on-page optimization (the things you do directly to your webpages to optimize them) and off-page optimization (the things you and others do outside of your domain webpages to optimize your rankings).

See how competitive the search for "search engine optimization" is? That's why a lot of people will start targeting long tail keywords.

We'll now take a look at some of on-page and off-page factors and more importantly how you can get your web site ranked higher so that you can get a lot more traffic. Good?

On-Page Optimization:

1) <Title> Tag - Place your target keywords for a specific webpage in your <Title> tag and as close as possible to the front. Here's an example for you ... assume your target keyword is on placement ranking experts :

Instead of <Title>How To Find Placement Ranking Experts</Title>

Do this instead => <Title> Placement Ranking Experts - How To Find Them</Title>

2) Meta Keywords - Place your target keywords as your first words under meta keywords and also add related terms as well if you have these keywords as content on the page

3) Meta Description - Create an appealing description because this is what the audience reads when your page comes up on the search engines. Be sure to have a variant of main keyword in there.

4) Header Tags - Have your main keyword in a single <H1> tag if possible. Also, have a variant of your keyword reinforcing your main keyword in <H2> tags. An example follows:

<H1>Placement Ranking Experts</H1> and <H2>Where To Find Placement Ranking Experts</H2>

5) Image <Alt> Tags - Place your main keyword in the "alt" attribute of an image on the page. And place variants of main keywords in "alt" attributes of other images on the page. Example:

Instead of <img src='images/search-engine.gif'>

Do this instead => <img src='images/search-engine.gif' alt='Search Engine'>

6) Whenever you add or remove a page from your site, be sure to update your sitemap and RSS feed. If you don't already have your sitemap and RSS feed, head to SiteMapDoc to create it.

That's pretty much it on on-page optimization ... now onto ...

Off-Page Optimization (Warning: You will fail if you don't grasp the info in this section!) :

Ok, let's cut to the chase on this one ... the ONLY thing you need to know about off-page optimization (but the MOST IMPORTANT) is that you need backlinks to your target webpage. Lots of backlinks (Read: Quantity) and get quality backlinks (Read: Quality).

Off-Page Optimization Tips :

1) Get one way backlinks whenever you can. Reciprocal links are still good but not as good as one way backlinks.

2) Have your main keyword and variants as your anchor text ... Examples as follows:

<a href=http://searchenginemarketing.com/search-engine-marketing.htm title=”Search Engine Marketing”>Search Engine Marketing</a>

In general:

<a href=”the page you want to be ranked for” title=”your keywords”>”Your Keywords”</a>

Major Pointers:

1) Be sure to customize your <Title> tag, meta description and meta keywords for every single webpage if possible. Too many sites out there use the same <Title> and metas for every single page of their site. Unbelievable!

2) As your site grows in link popularity and one way links to your site increase, your page rank will increase!

3) Though this isn't exactly search engine optimisation per se, be sure to have a sitemap (xml or html) that's linked from your domain's main page. This will help search engines crawl your site much more effectively!

4) Search engine optimisation is fun ... trust me. ;)