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5 Basics to Search Engine Optimization

November 5th, 2008 by admin

Anyone trying to make money online knows that you have to have traffic to your website in order to do so. Social network traffic from sources like StumbleUpon and Digg don’t usually convert into Adsense or affiliate program clicks. What you want is organic search engine traffic. The two primary reasons for needed organic search engine traffic to your site is because it is targeted and it is free. The hardest part is getting your site ranked well in the search engines for the keyword(s) that you are targeting.

Let’s take a look at 5 proven and simple SEO strategies that you can implement today, or modify, in order to improve your search engine rankings.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are great and chances are you are probably already using them. Making sure that you are using them correctly and efficiently is another story. Let’s look at the title and description tags as the keyword tag is weighted less in the search engines, specifically Google.

In your title tag you want to use your keyword at least once. If you are using a Wordpress blog, you can use the All in One SEO Pack and it will allow you several different setups for the title tag. You don’t want your site name in it, or “Welcome to my site” or forget to put something in there and see “Enter title here”. You want your page title (if a single post) or your main keyword here to appear on each page.

The description tag is what appears in the search engine results and is very critical. You want to make a description that has your targeted keyword(s) in it at least once, but is very appealing and teasing to draw the person into your site. Don’t reveal to much information here, make them want to click into your site.

**Important note about your keywords. Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a site’s ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as “keyword stuffing” and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.

Navigation Links

You want to put your navigation links to the bottom of your code. Why? When the search engines read your sites, they begin at the top of the code and work their way down. Usually this equates into a top to bottom, left to right sequence. If you fill up the first parts of your code with navigation links and other worthless stuff, the search engine spiders will just pass you over because they think that your site is full of links. They also won’t easily rank you for your real content that you have in your site.

Alt tags

If you have an image, you need an alt tag. This is basically a description for the image. The search engine spiders can’t see what the picture is about so you need to tell them. This also comes in handy when people search for that product or what ever the image is about through image search engines, such as Googles image search.

Keyword placement

You will want to use your keywords in the first paragraph or two and the last couple of paragraphs as well. Sometimes you can lose the fact of where to put your keywords. One way to put your keyword and increase your link structure is to put your keyword as the link at the bottom of your site in the © Copyright section. See the bottom of this site for an example.

Anchor Text

The anchor text that you use can help you, or it can hurt you. One thing that the search engines take into account is finding too many anchor texts being the same within a short amount of time. If you vary your anchor text, it will help. It won’t hurt your seo of your site and link building efforts.

An example would be if you were linking to a site for ford tractor parts. If you vary your anchor text to read “old ford tractor parts”, “ford 8100 parts”, or “starter for antique ford tractor” you are still showing the relevancy of your links.

Don’t ever use “click here” or “visit my site” as those aren’t keywords that pay.

Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, little tricks that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your website’s keyword ranking. Every little bit of knowledge that you can learn about search engine optimization will pay dividends in the future.

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