Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO), a subset of search engine marketing, is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” search results.

SEO Tips

* Keywords are the arm of your success in SEO, use those keywords that are immediately related or targeted to your topics. Take care not to over-crowd your content with keywords and take keywords throughout the substance instead of concentrating it at the start or at the conclusion.

* 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.

* Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

* 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.

* I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

* Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

* 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. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

* Appropriate title and meta-tags makes better change on page optimization, and appropriate, targeted, topic based, exact keywords and phrases in meta-tags assist spiders discover your site easily.

* My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. The links are keywords. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

* 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.

* Back-link or incoming link is significant, so make links with prospective partners that can increase traffic to your site.

* Prepare contents that gives your visitors exact data about your products and services. Offer something unusual and rare than general contents to improve your website, update your contents regularly and make new resources. Add more content to your website but never have it replicate by copying others. Duplicate content is well recognized by search engines and gives your website lower rank.

Search engine optimization is a growing industry that allows enterprising webmasters to monetize traffic from their websites through increases in traffic and the sale of advertising or products to that traffic.

One particular search engine optimization strategy that increases the success of websites is the building of quality links. Now, links of all kinds are valuable as long as they don’t come from spam or other bad neighborhood areas of the Internet, but there are certain kinds of links that are worth the very most: gov and edu links.

In particular, links from trusted universities are an excellent source of trust and page rank because Google, Yahoo and MSN trust them immensely. If you think about it, you can understand why they’re so trusted; university pages publish scholarly articles and make advances in the sciences and literary criticism that need to be syndicated across the web because they have influences on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

As a result of this inherent trust, if you can get links on edu pages, your search engine optimization efforts are likely to yield more fruitful results. The Harvard Weblogs project is an example of a way to achieve edu links.

Harvard Law School hosts blogs online that can be run by students in Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School or Harvard College, so a fair number of people have access to exclusive edu link domains. Harvard is particularly effective for these links because the homepage of Harvard University has a page rank of 9, suggesting Google trusts the root domain to an extraordinary degree.

Weblogs are also great for search engine optimization because you can report on recent news that many people may not have heard of yet. This makes your content fresh and ensures that people will like reading it and thereby be more likely to link back to it on their own websites.

The more people that link back to your original article about breaking news, the more links Google and Yahoo will find for your website and the more they will trust it, instinctively. Really, any added content to your website that you figure out in advance that many people will like should be used to attempt to generate links for your site and increase its search engine optimization as a result.

If you have particularly great articles or information that you know other people would like and link back to, you should attempt to get your article promoted at social media sites like Delicious, Digg or StumpleUpon. You should also consider doing things like posting an amusing viral video on your website and publishing it on YouTube with a link back to your website.

Anything that allows for more and more people to see your content and link back to it, the better. Along these same lines, you should enlist the help of any friends you may have online to back you up when you submit your content to these websites, in the hope that they will help you make it to the front page and thereby gain an unbelievable amount of traffic.

Remember, for more websites, traffic plus a bit of creativity equals money, so have a plan to monetize that traffic you’re trying to build before you even build it. It’s best not to put adds up before it comes, but be ready to monetize it when you realize it’s gained enough traffic to be worth it.