So what is search engine optimization (SEO)? Every huge search engine out there has certain things they do to find website with the data the surfer is looking for. Search engine optimization is what someone does to their webpage to get the search engines to pick them for certain web searches. When someone types in a certain keyword the search engine looks for a website with those words in them along with related information. Website history and reputation also plays a role in the search engine pickings.
The top search engine of all is google. Yahoo and MSN are also popular, but not like google. Google ranks a page on its history and the amount of links linking to it. Once it has ranked it, it gives the page a PR (page rank). The higher a page rank, the better. These page ranks are updated every once in a while.
Keywords are the most important aspect when dealing with SEO. Other things that make a big impact are page rank, link building (covered in another section of thie website), and html tags like alt, title, meta name and headings (keep reading for info on this).
You want to use a particular keyword sprinkled throughout your website, article or blog in certain places. You want to choose keywords that do not have an overwhelming amount of competition. If you choose to use a keyword like CD (a very popular one), your page will not even be seen on any of the first pages of a search engines results. The pages that have a good page rank and a longer history will always be on top of yours. So you want to use a keyword(s) that is/are related to your product, but not a very popular one.
A good tool you can use to find out which keywords are very popular and which ones are popular but not too popular is in the free tools section of this website. So use it to your advantage.
When placing your keywords, put them at the beginning and ending of your web page. Also make one of them bold, italic, and underlined. Start out with the keyword in each sentence of each paragraph and here and there throughout the paragraph. Be careful not too get too carried away. Do not place the keyword everywhere!
For webpages, it is important that you not only optimize your keywords in the text of your page, but you also need to include those keywords in the title, alt and meta name. These can be edited in html mode. In the HTML tutorial (one of the options in the left column of the page) I went over the basics of creating your own webpage and covered what tags are and where they go. If you need some basic skills on this, go read the tutorial before we cover some more.
The beginning of a webpage’s HTML will always have a <head> section. This is stuff that the web surfer does not see, but the search engine does. In the <head> section, there are two important things. The <title> tag and the <meta name> tag. Under <title> you should always have your keyword. Under <meta name “description”> and <meta name “keywords”> you should also always have your keyword, and keywords associated with that keyword.
This is what it should look like for the keyword CD sale.
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>
<meta name=”description” content=”CD Sale”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”online, record store, independent, label, musician, buy, sell, distribution, CD, music, recording, artist, credit card, sales, independant, audio”>
<title>CD Sale - Best music on the net</title>
</head>
Search engines read this to see what is on your webpage. Keep the <title> between 3 and 9 words and only use keywords. Use 5 - 10 keywords in the <meta name “keyword”>.
In the body of your html code (what the web surfer sees), you want to include alt tags, heading tags and hyperlinks.
Here is an example of my home page. (Notes is Red)
<head>
<title>Make Money Online|Make Money At Home</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type”
content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″> (This is the format of the webpage)
<link href=”style.css” type=”text/css”
rel=”stylesheet”>
<meta content=”MSHTML 6.00.2900.3059″ name=”GENERATOR”>
<meta name=”keywords”
content=”make money online, make money at home, make money from home, blogging, make money blogging, internet marketing”> (These are the keywords)
<meta name=”description”
content=”Make Money Online, make money at home with Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Adsense, and Internet Marketing”> (This is the desription)
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”> (This is a robot.txt file, it follows links on your webpage)
</head>
You want to include a robot.txt file. Just make a txt document (use notebook on windows), and put :
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Then save it as robots.txt.
Then upload it to your directory, whatever your host is.
This tells spiders from search engines to follow the links on your page and index them.
I went over headings in the HTML tutorial, but one thing i did not mention is that you want to make sure that you put your keywords in the headings. There are <h1> to <h6> headings. They always come out bold and should be used as the title of a section of the webpage.
Alt tags are tags that are associated with a picture on your page. If you want someone to see text when they roll their mouse over an image, you give it and alt tag (also covered in HTML tutorial). Including the keyword in your alt tag will boost your rating in a search engine.
So that is SEO in a nutshell. I use SEO Elite to do all of this for me. But it does cost a few bucks. It is well worth the time and effort.
Make sure to include hyperlinks (covered in the building links section of this website) as part of your SEO strategy. It is very important.
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[…] After you have studied how to make a general web page, you will want to learn how to optimize the website you created for search engines to find. You want search engines to find your page so it can get more visits. With some simple guidelines you can make this happen. SEO […]