What is SEO?

What is SEO ?

So you are here because your are wondering what SEO is? SEO is called Search Engine Optimization. The name pretty much gives you a hint itself but, let’s take a deeper look into better understanding what Search Engine Optimization is, how it works, and how it will benefit you and your website or blog.

If you own a website or a blog, you of course want to rank(be placed higher within search engines) and target as much traffic(website visits/hits) as you can. Nothing beats Organic Traffic. Organic Traffic is natural traffic that comes from people searching for keywords and terms that relate to your website within search engines and simply going to yours.

The more traffic that your website receives,the more money that you can make off of simply managing your website about something you may or may not love to write about. With this you don’t have to put in money to make it. If you are clueless to making money online with your website, shoot on over to our “Making Money Online” category.

Now that these basics are out of the way, let’s discuss SEO. As stated above, this is a practice of optimizing your website to rank well within search engines. I will discuss a couple of the main, basic ways of doing so.

• Building Back-links
• Using Anchor Text
• Using Keywords To Target Traffic
• Optimizing Your Meta Tags
• Unique Content

The best way to rank well within Google is by building back-links. A back-link is simply a one way link back to your site. Google counts this as a vote for your website. You want to build quality back-links with sites that are relevant to your niche(what your website is about) and with high PR websites. (PR is Page Rank 1-10, 10 being the highest). You can check website page rankings by simply using the Google Page Rank Checker tool.

Within back-links you want to use anchor text. Anchor text is the text within a link. Within this text you want to use keywords that you are trying to rank for within Google. So for let’s say this site, I would link with a few sites with my site link on theirs being “SEO Tips” then on a few others “SEO Tutorials” and on others “Search Engine Optimization” and so on so forth. You don’t want to over use just one keyword. Try to rank for a few different ones that are related to your website. It’s up to you how many you want to try and rank well for.

Using keywords which are related to your website to drive traffic is of course a must. As stated above, these are terms that you want people to search for within Google and stumble upon your site by searching them. Use keywords in meta tags, page titles, article titles, categories in your navigation bar, within your articles and etc. Do not overuse keywords in articles or on pages for this is called keyword stuffing and your site may get penalized or banned.

For every web page that you have, you want to have optimized meta-tags which are in the header of your page. Use keywords within your meta-title, description, and meta-keywords. Meta-keywords really aren’t too effective on ranking anymore because of the abuse of keyword stuffing in the past. It still doesn’t hurt to use it though. In your titles of pages, use some keywords you are trying to rank for. In the description, describe what the page is about while using a few keywords within the first 150 characters or so.

Unique Content is something I have to stress. Google doesn’t like duplicate pages and plagiarized work. Always update with fresh content that hasn’t been discussed before. Even if it has, write it better than all of those others out there. I do not recommend using article re-writers. If you can’t write a decent article about something you are interested in, you don’t need to be running a website.

Remember, you don’t have to pay out thousands of dollars to have your site ranked well within Google. You can do this yourself and we give you all of the tools, tutorials, and tips needed to achieve this. We use all of these methods on this site constantly and by each day that goes by, we rank higher and higher.

If you have any further questions simply leave a comment.

–R&R Craig

Learn SEO – Design & Structure

Now that we have introduced you to search engine optimization let’s move on. Design and structure play a crucial role in developing your website. You want to make it appealing but then again crawlable by search engine spiders.

Navigation

As I have explained previously, with navigation you don’t want to use images or flash in place of your text for categories. Using images behind it with text layered over it or css menu’s works fine. The reason being is search engine spiders cannot read the text for your categories when they are an image or flash object. They read text.

Now with your categories you don’t want to use titles for example if you have an seo site:

tips , tricks , tutorials and etc..

Try to use some of your targeted keywords in it that define your websites categories like:

SEO Tips , SEO Tutorials, etc..

Meta Tags:

Optimizing your tags may be tricky for some, let’s discuss meta keywords first. These will not help your page ranking anymore because of the abuse in the past but it is still good through put a few of your targeted keywords in there. If I remember the limit is 600 chars in the tag. I would only use 25 or less words to really describe my site / page.

Using a meta description for each page describes what it is about in the search engine listings. Try to make it stick out from the other sites. Now for meta title and pages titles you want to base it off of your pages topic with one or 2 keywords in it. This will help your ranking and is appealing to the user searching for selected content.

Layout

Designing a nice layout is always hard. As explained in the intro, you always want to draw out a rough draft on paper before you begin to put it to action. Don’t make your layout too overwhelming with links,text,images crammed all over. I usually stick with a nice simple structure with a few decent images and what not. It all depends on what kind of site you are running. With gaming websites you can get away with all of the cool images everywhere and what not. Remember, css does wonders.

Sitemap

Having a site map let’s spiders know all of your pages updates and what pages you have. Anytime you add new content or update a page you want to make an update your you site map. You can find free sitemap websites all over the net that make it simple to create one. You want to submit it to Google when you are done. I will just discuss the robots.txt file here. With this file it will tell search engine spiders which directories that you want crawled and which ones you do not. This helps if you have private things or just stuff you don’t want listed in search engines.

The next addition to this tutorial will be on Content. Stay tuned!

Introduction To SEO

Learn SEO – Introduction

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. What all of this means is the study of optimizing your website to rank higher and get to the top of search engines. It is pretty self explanitory. SEO is usually considered a crucial role in web marketing. This helps in promoting websites and getting them to the top.

One well known fact in Search Engine Optimization is that even if you do everything correctly and execute all of the seo techniques properly, this does not gaurantee you a top rating in the search engines. This takes time and patience for down the road you will be successful in achieving your goals.

Search Engines

So how how do these things work? These search engines work by crawling websites and placing them into their search in the fit category and ranking. A lot of people that do SEO end up making their pages for the search engine spiders but not for the users. Keep this in mind, you want to make your pages well rounded for both users and spiders. A search engine spider does not navigate through your pages, read articles, click ads and even buy products.

When optimizing, yes you want to rank for Google because it is the most popular engine out there but you want to carefully optimize your website for other engines also. Each one of these engines have their own algorithms in which decide a websites placement and ranking within. So the fact of the matter is, different search engines like different stuff so you want to conquer all of these.

Planning Ahead

When you decide that you are going to build a new website or blog, you want to always plan ahead. Begin brainstorming different idea’s for your website, even draw your layout’s rough draft down on paper. Write out all of your idea’s down to help you figure out what you want to do. Before doing this you want to of course, figure out what you want your website to be about.

Try to customize yourself a layout that is going to be search engine friendly but then again be user friendly. Take image/flash navigation menu’s into consideration also. You can always make a dazzling menu using text with some images behind it or even css menu’s. Using text for your categories helps spiders better define your site and what it is about.

Choosing Your Niche

Now you got your design and your idea’s but what is your niche? Try focusing on something that isn’t too popular, think up different domain names that would have your niche in them. What keywords are you going to base your website off of? This can be very hard for some but simply use this main factor, choose something that is popular but isn’t at the top of the list, something you could rank for easier than others.

This is where Keyword research comes in. There are many tools out there that you can use to see which keywords you would like to try and rank for. Again if you are starting a website, let’s say it is about “Video Games”. You aren’t going to try and rank for the keyword video games, if you have cheats on your website try to rank for maybe GTA cheat codes.

Next we will be discussing Design & Structure so stick around for I will be writing a whole tutorial to using SEO and giving you a better understanding!