Optimizing your site for SEO is very important if you would like the search engines to send you traffic.
Sure, you can use short term fixes such as pay per click which will get you some traffic but when the money runs out you are back to square one.
Nothing beats the long term value of organic, natural seo.
You should know that organic, search engine traffic is the best kind of traffic because usually the visitors are people who have a genuine interest in your product because they have searched for your site by typing in specific keywords in a search engine.
They are more likely to buy your product or click on your ads which of course in turn makes you money.
SEO is complicated, there is no doubt about that and these tips are a really basic guide not a complete solution to seo success but saying that, you can have moderate success just by applying these basic fundamentals.
We will assume that you already have your site ready with the relevant content and that you have done some keyword research in advance.
Step 1: Optimize the Web Site.
First of all, you should start by optimizing your web site pages.
Optimizing your web site pages includes making sure that you have the correct tags on your pages, the correct keywords you are aiming for and most importantly relevant content.
When optimizing a page you should always start by including the main keywords in the meta title. You should usually go for a maximum of 3 keywords per page.
If your page has more than one keyword or phrase feel free to separate them by using the | tag.
Usually it’s a good idea to enter some details for the meta description and meta keywords. Some SEO professionals will poo poo you and say that its not important, but hey it does not hurt either and its better to be safe than sorry.
H1 tags on your page
After you have done the meta titles and meta keywords you need to make it easier for search engine spiders to read your keywords within the body of the page starting with the page title.
That is done by including a <h1> tag. To optimize your site with <h1> tags you need to open the file with the source code for the site and include <h1> tags around your title of the page which will be in the content.
<h1>Your Title with Keywords</h1>.
Notice that we use the / – end tag to close the <h1> tags.
Congratulations you’ve made your first step in optimizing your webpage for search engines!
Bold Text on Your Keyword is very Important
The second important factor in SEO is using bold text. Bold text instructs the search engines as to which keywords your page is concentrating on. If you use a CMS like wordpress or blogger they will offer to make your text bold when writing an article.
If you are using source code you can make your text bold by using the <strong> tag.
Craig Edmonds knows about <strong>Internet Marketing</strong >.
You see what I did there? I highlighted in bold the words “Internet Marketing” and again we have used the / end tag at the end of the “strong” tag.
Try to use bold text where the keywords you want to rank well for are included in the article.
Try to include your main keyword at least 6 times in the body of your content making sure the keywords are in bold.
Step 2. Make Use of Site Maps
You will need to create a sitemap for your site. That will make the search engines job a lot easier to read the content on your site and it will help you rank better.
Creating your sitemap is easy and there are many guides and articles on how it can be done
Site maps can be created in various different ways so the best I can tell you is just google “creating a sitemap” and read one of the guides.
It shouldn’t take you much time.
Step 3. Create a robots.txt file
After the meta tags, h1, keywords and sitemap are done we need to go to the next level.
We will need to create a robots.txt file for the site.
Robots.txt page are used by search engines like google to index your site content.
More about this can be found at http://www.robotstxt.org.
The above site will help you add a file like this on your site, and it will make reading for search engines easier which basically increases your rankings above the sites without a robots.txt page.
Step 4. Link Building.
The final step in optimizing your site for SEO is link building. Not only do links help you increase your rankings (SERPS) but it will increase your page rank.
When linking to your site you should request that the sites that link to it to use anchor text that matches your keywords.
If your site’s keywords are aimed at “weight loss” then having links coming back to your site with “how to paint walls” is not going to help. The same can be said about a site link which simply says “Click Here”. Its is not doing you any great favors.
Instead, “weight loss tips” in the anchor text coming back to your site would do much better.
To link to your pages use this code
<a href=”YOUR SITE URL” title=”YOUR KEYWORD(S)”>YOUR ANCHOR TEXT</a>
Of course don’t forget to edit the site url and anchor text to fit your site.
How to Get Links in the First Place
You can do link building on many ways.
For example there are a blogs that displays links for top commentators. You just visit a blog site, take a few minutes of your time to comment and you will usually be able to include a web site url in your post which will result in a back link.
Try to post on blogs that use the do-follow rule. Just a quick search on google for “do follow blogs” will show you a few of them.
Another way to gain back links is doing directory submissions. If you visit directories, either local or global, you can usually submit your web site for a small fee.
Forums are also a great source of back links. Usually you can include a link back to your site in your forum signature.
There are thousands of ways to gets back links and these are just a couple of them. A quick online search will offer you many articles and guides on how to get back links.
Google Page Rank is an Integral part of Link Building
Nobody knows page rank as good as google because they invented page rank!
Pagerank is a google rating scale from 0-10. 0 being the lowest score on the scale and 10 being the highest. To view the page rank of a site you need to have the google toolbar installed.
Its imperative to understand the importance of back links from sites with different Page Ranks.
For example, 1 link from a PR6 page will do the same job as 50 links from sites with PR0-3 pages.
You should note that this is an example not an exact calculation but it does demonstrate that you should aim to get your link on sites with higher page rank.
High Page Rank = Higher Quality
With Page rank and link building its more about quality than quantity. You could spend months getting hundreds of links on low page rank sites, when you could have spent a week getting a couple of links on higher page rank sites.