Search Engine Optimization Basics, How-To & Tips

First of all, keywords are everything, and will either make or break a website. It is vitally important to choose the most relevant keywords for your website.

I suggest going to Google's Keyword Tool and Wordtracker's Free Keyword Suggestion Tool to get a few good keywords.

You can go to goRank's Keywords Lookup Tool to find related words for a particular keyword phrase.

You want to make sure that the keywords you choose are searched for often, but have a low competition. You do not want to go after keywords with a high competition because it will be almost impossible for you to get a high search engine ranking for them.

The more relevant the keywords, the better. So keep this in mind when choosing your keywords. This is the most important step you can take, and one that is often overlooked.

You may be asking what exactly keywords are. Keywords are simply what people type in a search engine to find what they are looking for. So let's say you have a site about "Pet Food." If someone wanted to find your website they could type in "pet food" or "iams pet food" or any variation.

Just remember to make sure the keywords you choose are relevant and very specific, and have a low competition and are searched for daily.

Now that you have chosen your keywords, you need to place them in the right places on the page you are optimizing. You should optimize your homepage before any other page of your website.

There are certain HTML tags that you need to place your keywords in. If you don't know anything about HTML then this is the time to learn. It is not hard, and you don't need to know everything about HTML. You just need to know what the HTML tags are and how to edit or add them to your site.

Here are some resources for you to get an understanding of what HTML tags are and how they are used.

The first two explain what META tags are and how they are used.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp
http://home.earthlink.net/~hwatts/meta.html

This resource explains the basic HTML tags, what they do, and how they are used.

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/html/article.php/3478151#html

Now that you know what HTML and tags are, I am going to discuss the places on your website that is most important to place your keywords.

The two most important tags that we are going to focus on are the <~TITLE~> and <~H1~> tags. These are used without the "~" but have to be used here in order for them to show up correctly.

All that you need to do is look for the <~TITLE~> and <~/TITLE~> tags in the page that you want to optimize. You will place your keyword phrase between these two tags. If you are optimizing for more than one keyword phrase, separate them with a "|" instead of "and" "or" and "the."

I strongly recommend that when you are first starting to optimize that you only use one keyword phrase between your tags. Also, it is more worth while to optimize your homepage before any other webpage on your site.

The next tag were are going to look at is the <~H1~> and <~/H1~> tags. If your website does not have these tags I would advise you to add them and place the same keyword phrase between them.

To edit the HTML of your website you can download a free HTML editor called Nvu to easily edit your webpages, and it's 100% free.

You can also check out www.totalwebseo.com for step-by-step videos that explain this concept better. You can also sign up for a free 5 day Mini-Course and receive some great SEO tips. You will learn how to generate over 500+ search engine visitors per day.

Every website must have content. It is vital for your website to have new content added daily, or weekly. Google loves websites that have new content added on a consistent basis.

The easiest way to do this is by having your own blog in which you can post articles or information related to your site.

You can sign up for a free Blogger account and start posting today. They will host your blog on their server, or you can choose to have it reside on your domain.

Take a brief tour to learn more about blogging.

WordPress is another blogging tool. It is a weblog platform that is downloaded and installed on your domain. Or, you can sign up for a WordPress.com blog account that is hosted on their domain.

You can take a look at the WordPress Tutorials to learn more about WordPress and how to use it.

Some like WordPress better for its ease of use and customization. Others like Blogger because they get better standings with the search engines. Blogger is owned by Google, if that helps you decide.

Either one is fine, as long as you post to your blog daily, or at least several times a week.

If you plan on having your website for a long time, it would be more beneficial to have your blog hosted on your own domain. Your blog URL would look something like this: http://www.Your-Site.com/blog, or whatever you decide to call your directory.

Once you have your blog set up it's time for some SEO. The first thing you should do is pick a good keyword phrase and place it in the title of your blog.

Then go to http://www.submitexpress.com/metatag.html and fill out the simple form, putting in your blog title, writing a description and keywords you want to use. Click "yes" for both questions, put your name as the author, and then hit "Generate META Tags."

Once you have the meta tags you need to go to your blog template and insert the code between the <~head~> and <~/head~> tags. They will be shown without the "~".

Your blog should now be optimized, and the next step is to optimize every blog post. To do this you should pick a keyword phrase that relates to what you're writing about.

Place the keyword phrase in the title of the post as well as throughout the body of the post, but not too much. A good keyword density is 2%-5%.

You can check your keyword density by using this Keyword Density Analyzer Tool.

Also, you want to place your keywords in the tags of your blog posts as well. Remember, you want to try to post to your blog at least once a day if you can for best results.

Analyzing Website Traffic
Evaluating Web Site Performance
Increasing Link Popularity
Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking
Monitoring Search Engine Positions
Paid URL Inclusion
Pay Per Click Advertising
Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings
Search Engine Keywords Selection
Selecting a Search Engine Optimization Company