SEO is one of the most unnecessarily complicated jobs there is in the internet business world. There are so many “secrets” and “gurus” that offer you the hidden knowledge necessary for top search engine rankings, when in reality, search engine optimization is actually pretty simple.
Search engine optimization, can be divided into two parts: on-site SEO, and link building.
On-site SEO is the process of optimizing the content of your pages for a particular keyword or keywords. The easiest way to do this is to use a free tool like Web SEO that will analyze your webpage and make suggestions on how you can better optimize it.
At it’s simplest, on-site SEO is making sure that your keywords are found (in the right numbers) in the right places. Specifically, the search engines want to see your keywords in:
- Page titles
- Page body
- Bold text
- Top of page
- Bottom of page
- Alt text
- Text links
Link building, the second half of SEO, is at least as important as on-site SEO, but is often neglected. When search engines look at your site, they also look at all of the sites that link to your site. Each site that links to your site gives your site a certain number of “votes”, based on several factors.
So, the more quality links you can get to your site, the higher you will rank in the major search engines. But before you can start gaining links to your site, you need to know what makes a quality link. There are several factors that determine a link’s quality:
1 – Anchor text
A high quality link will have your keyword(s) in the anchor text, or the clickable text part of the link.
2- Site quality
A high quality link is one from a quality, unique, content based site related to your site.
3- Anchor text variation
When building links, you’ll want to vary your anchor text. If all of your links have the same text, search engines may discount them as spam.
4- Slowly but surely
Good things come to those who wait. Building links should be done slowly and steadily. If you build a whole bunch of links at once, you risk the links being discounted as spam by the search engines.
What is SEO and why is it so important?
Basic SEO Tips:
- Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags.
- Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.
- Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.
- Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.
- Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag.
- Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods. A good rule of thumb is if your pages do not contain any words that reflect the content of the site you are linking to, do not link to it.
- Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans.
- Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.
- Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.
- Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.
