Search Engine Optimization? (Stage 4)

SEO is the process of using different methods in your website to improve the volume and quality of traffic from search engines by way of the organic (natural) search.

In other words: to build a search engine friendly site (while keeping it human friendly) so you could rank higher in the search engine listings. By optimizing your site, you are trying to achieve the first couple of pages inthe search engine listings to increase your traffic.

What is an Organic listing?

When you type in a keyword or phrase into the search engine you receive thousands and thousands of pages (usually) of "relevant pages" to look at. Those listings are organic (natural) listings, as opposed to paid listings that show up as sponsors.

The Basics of How to do Search Engine Optimization

There are many ways to optimize your site. This will give you a good start on how to create a search engine friendly website.

Keyword Research - needs to be done for each page so you can optimize each landing page.

Example: Your site is about baby clothes. -

• Home page explains the whole site (keywords for the other 4 pages)  
• 1st page: girls clothes (keywords for ONLY girls clothing)  
• 2nd page: dresses for girl (keywords for ONLY girls dresses)  
• 3rd page: boys clothes (keywords for ONLY boys clothes)  
• 4th page: boys dress clothes (keywords for ONLY boys dress clothes)  

This is extremely important to make sure you optimize each page by using the keywords for that page within your original content.

Don't overdo it. This is known as keyword stuffing, which is a very unethical technique. Many webmasters used to do this technique (I have found a few that still do), many of the search engines don't "look" at the meta tag, but some still do. 5 keywords are a good start.

If you are having problems with finding the best keywords, I have a few keyword suggestion tools on my keyword research page that may help.

While using keywords in your site content, try not to use the same word over and over again.

The reason to use certain keywords per page is when you submit your URL or sitemap to the search engines, they will be able to tell that each page is a different theme but still under your main theme.

Anchor Text

This is clickable text on a web page to take you to another place, within that website or out of that site. It provides double duty, unless you do it incorrectly.

The correct way will:

• Tells search engines what the link page is about  
• Explains within a few words to your visitors what information that page is about  

Incorrect Way -Click here for more information on free search engine submission.

"Click here" does not explain to your visitors (unless they read the whole sentence) where they will be going. Do you want to be ranked for "click here" on the search engines.

Correct Way - See more information to submit website to search engines for free

Link popularity

Measuring the quantity and quality of other sites that link to a specific website or page on the internet.

• One-way links - A website has information on types of clothes to dress your baby in for professional pictures and they link to your site  
• Reciprocal links - A web site sells baby shoes, they put a link to your site on theirs and you put a link to your site to theirs.  
• Get listed into one or more of the major directories: Yahoo,dmoz or a search engine friendly directory. See more information on link popularity directory submission.  

Understand this: more is not better at times, you want to have quality links by getting links from sites that have high PageRank and are within the theme of your site. If you have a site about kids clothes, don't link to a site about herbal medicine.

Link building does help with search engine optimization, but it is not the only componet to achieving high page rank.

Need help with link building? You should not participate in:

• Link Exchanges- exchanging text or banner links with other websites just to improve placement in search engines  
• Link Farms- any group of sites that all link to every other page that is within a group  

The search engines will de-index (ban) web sites that participate in link exchange and link farm programs.

Optimizing for Top Words

The top words I am referring to are the top "money" words that people are paying high dollar for in their advertising (like Google Adsense) and words that are very difficult to rank high for in the search engine results page (SERP).

The words; cash, financial, search engine optimization and many, many more are the words I am talking about. These words are very difficult to rank for in a site as they are so widely used and many of the top 30 results from the search engines are from web sites that have been around for a long time.

If you are thinking of using these words as a basis for your new website, you may want to use some of the long tails of these words within the content of your site.

You have completed the first 7 steps, the next step will help you generate traffic to your new website.