Search Engine Optimization SEO

In Search Engine Optimization SEO , there are many ways of optimizing your websites for search engines. Today we are going to talk about a little bit of on page optimization.

When designing a page you want to have some keywords to build your page around. The reason being is with Search Engine Optimization SEO , you are trying to rank for keyword phrases that are going to bring you traffic.

Make sure you use a keyword phrase in your page title, description and to start your page of, use it in an h1 tag. I would use 2 or 3 different keyword phrases and within your page use each one about 3-5 times. This is great for Search Engine Optimization SEO . You also want to bold text keyword phrases, italicize them and make put a few anchor links in that link to relevant pages.

Now for your header menu’s if you have a navigation menu in your header which is preferred, do not use image menus. Search engine crawlers cannot read images, but they can read the alt tags on the images. I prefer using a CSS menu and using text in it for your navigation menu links. You can find many CSS menu generators on the web which is very beneficial when it comes to Search Engine Optimization SEO.

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Search Engine Placement

Search Engine Placement has been explained time and again all throughout our website. Your Search Engine Placement is determined by many factors of your website. As explained in previous lessons, for Search Engine Placement , Link Building is one of the main keys to getting your website ranking better within search engines.

Now for better Search Engine Placement, You need to focus on other key points of having a good Search Engine Optimization SEO site. You want to have unique content that is well written and well built around keywords that you are trying to rank for. There are many tools on the net to help you target the best keywords that you want to rank for within your Search Engine Placement.

Search Engine Optimization SEO for short is used in many other ways. You can use Google’s keyword tool to help look for keywords that you want to build your site around. If your site is just getting off of its feet, try to focus on less competitive keywords with a high search volume for the month. Once your site starts to build rank and have a better Search Engine Placement then you can start focusing on more competitive keywords.

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How To Use Keywords

If you have read our previous lesson “What Are Keywords?” let’s move on to how to use them. As we explained in the prior lesson, keywords are what make or break your website when ranking within search engines.

Here are the steps we are going to explain with using them:

• Meta Tags
• Navigation Menu’s
• Text Formatting
• Anchor Text / Back Links

Meta-Tags

Please read our other lessons on meta-tags and how to use them for a more in depth explanation on what they are and how to use them.

Meta-Title, Meta-Keywords, Meta-Description

Meta tags are the information in your header that tells the search engines what your website and certain pages are. In your tags you have the Title, Description, Keywords. The title is well, what it says. It is your page title. In your title you want to use keywords within your description. Please refrain from using your website name or your website address in the title unless your website name has the keywords in it that you are trying to rank for. In the title use a brief description of what your page is about while using a keyword or two within it.

Your meta-keywords are the keywords that your site is relevant to and what you are trying to rank for. Use no more than 30.

The meta description is what the description of your page is and this comes up in search engines under the page title/url/link to your site. Again use a brief description using no more than 140-160 characters in it with keywords that you are trying to rank for in it also.

Navigation Menu’s

For a more in depth explanation on how to optimize your navigation menu’s please visit our lesson for Focusing On Navigation Menu’s.

To give a brief explanation, you want to use keywords in place of your categories in your navigation menu’s. This helps you rank for the given keywords and it tells the search engines what each page/category is about and pretty much helps map your website out for the search engines.

Text Formatting

When writing your articles in the body of your page, you want to build it around keywords that you are ranking for. In the title of your article you want to use <h1>, <h2> tags which are basic HTML header tags for a paragraph. These tags weigh a lot within search engines.

When using keywords within your articles you want to bold and italicize them which also makes them stick out within search engines and also makes them weigh a lot. Don’t over due it with the bolding and italicizing of keywords for your page will look spammy and non-user friendly. Try to use each keyword 5-7 times in an article and don’t use anymore than 2-3 keyword phrases in each article.

Anchor Text / Back Links

As explained in our previous lesson, anchor text is one of the main factors in your website ranking. The anchors help tell the search engines that this is a keyword phrase that your site is about hence when someone goes to search for example “SEO Tips” your site will come up. Whether it is first page or 20-30 pages back, it will come up. To help rank higher you want to use anchors in your back links. A back link is simply a link from another site to yours. As explained in the previous lesson, a back link is basically counted as a “Vote” for your website.

Always link with quality sites preferably with a high page rank. You can use the Google Page Rank Check Tool to determine what other websites rank. The ranking chart goes from 1-10, 10 being the highest.

For more information please visit our lesson on Anchor Text.

What are keywords?

Let’s get started with this chapter of are lesson discussing keywords, what they are, how and where to use them, and which ones to choose.

If you are new to SEO you may wonder what keywords are in the Search Engine Optimization world and how to find and use them.

Keywords are what make up your site, your niche/category and they tell a search engine what your site is about and help you place / rank within search engines. Keywords are the search terms that people are searching for in which you want to come up on the first page of the search engine when searched for.

When deciding what keywords you want to try and rank for with your website there are a few factors that come into play. Which ones are related? Which are most searched for, and which are most and least competitive. When you first get a website going, you don’t want to focus on keywords that have a lot of competition for it will take a while for you to rank for them. You have to build your website up day by day. So, try to rank for less competitive keywords in which you can easily move up and beat the competition for that will bring your website traffic/hits and increase your website popularity.

Don’t totally cut out the competitive keywords though also, as your site grows in ranking and popularity, you will move up within the search engine. So mainly focus on the less competitive keywords but use and optimize for a few of the more competitive ones also so when the day comes that you see you are starting to achieve popularity and say over websites, you will already be somewhat ranking for those competitive keywords and you will move up and rank easier and faster for them.

Now, you want to use a couple tools here to determine which keywords that you want to start optimizing for. First you want to use the Google Keyword Tool. This will show you how many searches a keyword gets monthly, how competitive it is and you can also look at your competitions keywords and even use them. This helps and cuts off a lot of time. Also you can use the keywordspy tool for free to spy on your competitors which comes in handy when monetizing your website for making money with Google adsense. This will show you what keywords your competitors are making money off of with adsense. Saves you a heap of work. We would design a similar Google keyword tool but you can’t beat the leading search engines tools.

Google Keyword Tool

Keyword Spy Tool

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

Search Engine Optimization Poison Words

Here is a list I have dug up for a while back which are called Poison Words in the Google / SEO Tips world. These poison words are words you do not want to use with your site or blog for google and google adsense looks down upon them.

I am going to look around for more words to dig up so enjoy for now!

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!

Things you should always do with SEO

So what are the do’s when it comes to Search Engine Optimization? In our last discussion we talked about things that you shouldn’t do when optimizing your blog / site for search engines. To follow up please read our other topic “Things Never To Do With SEO” before you get started reading this.

Let’s get started shall we?

Don’t optimize once then quit.

When you are going to optimize for search engines, never quit after a day or two. SEO is not a one time thing. You have to stay on top of it everyday, with every new addition you make to your site, every new page. With search engines, they are always changing their algorithms so the methods and techniques that we use now might not work down the road.

When applying SEO Techniques to your site you will never see results instantly. Keep in mind that patience is the key and the seo methods that you use on your site now will benefit you down the road.

For beginners.

If you are new to SEO the few tips that you learn are not going to be enough. Always look around the net to learn new SEO techniques. Look around for new articles and tutorials that are recent also.

Using web analytics.

This is crucial when you are applying these methods to your website. This can help you see what and what isn’t working so you can switch it up. Also keep track on all of your content and see what is most popular, what the readers like to see. That way you can base new content off of those things.

Using a site map

Site Maps are crucial to getting a higher ranking in search engines. A site map helps spiders find all of the important pages or the pages that you want to be shown on search engines. With every new page you add be sure to keep your map updated. if you have navigation menu’s that are hard for spiders to crawl this will also direct them down the right path. I have explained this in other articles about using text in your navigation menu’s. If your site is fairly big, use a few different site maps.

Using SEO in your URLs

Don’t use basic names in your urls. Don’t use a bunch of numbers or letters either. You want to make your urls have keywords in them spaced out by hyphens. Don’t use underscores, hyphens mean the same thing as a space between the words as underscores do not.Don’t over do it with the hyphens though because it will make your page look like it is a spam to users. I’d say when doing this have a limit of about 3 or 4. For example yoursite.com/seo-tips-and-tricks.html

Keyword Research

When you begin a website or a project you should do this from the start. This way you can figure out what keywords you want to rank for and what not to. Look at the volume of one keyword to the next. Try opening up a PPC account also. I prefer Google Ad Words. This helps you find out the volume of your keywords.

Title and Meta Tags

Search engines don’t care much for Meta Tags anymore because of the abuse in the past but again it does not hurt to do this. Titles are one of the most important factors. With your titles simply use the keywords that you are building your page and article around. This helps your ranking. Meta keywords won’t help you rank but when you have a Meta Description it will show up on search engines under your link and explains the page a little bit. When using Meta Keywords limit it to 600-700 characters. In the Meta Keywords only put keywords in there that don’t appear on your page.

Writing

Don’t just write for search engines and stuff all of your pages. This makes them looks spammy and your readers will not stick around. Write pages for your readers, the search engines have bots but has a bot read your article and stuck around? Has a bot bought anything or even signed up for a mailing list? You need keywords and such in your articles but don’t stuff the hell out of it.

Unique Content

As I have explained in other articles, unique content is the number one thing to do. This can be hard depending on what your niche is but if you have content that isn’t anywhere else, your readers will be intrigued. Make sure your content is interesting also, just because it is unique doesn’t mean it is great. Combine intriguing with unique and you got your self something nice.

Anchor Text – Internal Linking

As I have explained in my other article “Building Page Rank“, Anchor Text is also a must. Anchor Text helps spiders know what the page you linked to is about. Using keywords in the text helps your ranking but also tells them what the page is about when listing it in the search engines. If your anchor just says “Here”, it doesn’t help much for search engine visibility.

Building Links

Submit your site to directories that are popular, high ranked and trusted. Try and get links from popular sites in your niche and category. If you are running a site that is for your local area you can try to find trusted sites that are in your area geographically. Analyze your inbound links also to find what you may be looking for when linking and back linking. You can read more on back linking in our previous article “SEO Techniques all websites should use” along with many other techniques.

Social Media & Networks

Using social media websites like digg.com , propeller.com and many others gets your articles and sites exposed better. Also using social networks like twitter also can do the same thing. This helps you connect with many others directly to better promote your website. You can also use twitter to post new updates to your followers automatically. For more information, read the latest article I wrote for “Increasing site traffic with twitter on auto-pilot“.

And there you have it. These are some of the main things you should always do and use when optimizing your website or blog for search engines. If you have any questions please comment below or ask and discuss it in there forum. If you would like one on one training feel free to contact me.

craigygee@therantandrave.net

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