6 Free Tips For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

So you want to increase your page rank on Google and expand your company? Do you have a site that helps to market a product? Well in order to help market your product you need to learn what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and how it can help you.

Something to keep in mind as well, the key to your success doesn’t exactly depend upon you having the absolute best product! It’s just how you market the product. This concept is best illustrated when someone takes a close look at the company Microsoft.

This small mini-guide will help you to appreciate what SEO is and by the end, you should have a better understanding how to help improve your website and overall your business.

1. Keywords & Phrases

What are keywords? Well keywords are phrases you want your website to be found under. Often corporate climates force people to refer to things using special phrases. Remember that your keywords and phrases should be very specific towards your product, the keywords you use should define the product or idea you have.

Keep in mind that the keywords you choose to help represent your site should be contained within the content of your site. Whenever working with keywords although, you don’t want to write content that looks like a robot did it. Make sure that the keywords you choose are within the content, but also make the content fun and exciting so the customer who goes on your site won’t simply leave as fast as he/she came.

Finding Keywords

How do you find keywords? Well I use a site to help do the work for me. Let do a little exercise now…

Go to: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

In the search box, type “fishing”

Now from the search results we can conclude that there was over 37,683 searches for the keyword “fishing.” If you look below, you can see how there are many different categories that contain the keyword “fishing.” Keep in mind that those categories can also help you define your niche if you are working within an affiliate program.

Note: Remember to keep your website looking professional. As a customer I wouldn’t want to see misspelled words on your site, or a keyword like “fishing” about 20 times on your site. Even though I’m sure many of you want to start adding your keywords all over your site, remember what your mother said “always in moderation.”

You could also go to: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

This service is quite useful as you can get a variety of results with the amount of searches each month immediately.

2. Meta Tags

Now for a little html shall we? There are two types of Meta tags that are important for your site. Both the Meta description and Meta keyword tag help search engines and customers to understand what your site is really all about. One of the easiest changes you can do is with Meta tags, although I’ve seen even very large companies disregard them in which is a big mistake.

Something to keep in mind is that meta keyword tag is no longer supported on some major search engines. Although according to http://blog.etrix.ie, Yahoo gives the tag importance and therefore can help you in acheiving a higher ranking. Using the tag can help you, rather than penalize you on the Search Engines.

What does the Meta keyword Tags Look Like?

<meta name="keywords" content="fishing, ice fishing, bass fishing, fly fishing">

Let’s look at this a little closer…

Look where it says “content=”, the words that follow where it says “content=” is where your keywords should be. By doing such a simple thing it allows Google to know that your site is associated with those particular keywords.

What does the Meta description Tags Look Like?

<meta name="description" content="Welcome to the one place you need in order to improve your fishing game!!!.">

The description tag helps customers through many small widgets with a brief summary of what your site is about. The description tag should be either a sentence or a paragraph and not visually appear keyword stuffed. The sentences should read well to the human eyesince this tag is still used in many search results pages.

3. Content

Content on your site is also very important. The content within your site should carry many of the keywords that you have chosen. Important concepts that should be used with writing content are:

1. Don't have a site built purely from your own content.

• Why? Because it will take too long to create lots of pages.

2. Don't have a site built purely from other people's content.

• Why? Because you'll have little that's unique on your
  site. Search engines can frown on duplicate content so if you
  use sources of content that are not unique you'll need to
  do things to make those pages unique.

3. Don't have a site built purely of 'synthesized' content.

• Why? Because using fancy article-crawling-machines and other
  'automatic content machines' will backfire on you eventually.

4. Robots!!!

So what are Robots? Are they what have been depicted in many various movies of crazy mechanical beings with a lust to destroy the human race??? No…

In fact it’s a small little file within your site that tells the small little web crawlers what to do with your site. As defined by www.robotstxt.org, robots are…

Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content.

Each robots.txt file is different for each site. If you go to www.robotstxt.org there is a small manual you can read upon in order to help you make your very own robots.txt file.

5. Page Titles

So what’s so important about having a good page title? Well it allows your customer to understand a bit about your site without visiting it. For example…

Page Titles Done Wrong: "Welcome to Donald Ducks store" or “Your one stop shop”

What’s wrong with the titles is that your customer will have no idea what he/she will be looking at if they were to visit your online site. One of the first things your customer views is your titles, it’s your first chance to help persuade the customer to visit your site instead of your competitors.

Page Titles Done Right: “Leading the world to the water - Your online fishing resource guide.”

Taken from: http://www.fishing.com/

Note: Try to include some of your keywords within your page title. Notice how the word fishing is within the title itself.

6. Links

One of the most important ways of quickly getting a great page rank consists of building your links. There are many different types of links but the most popular and most effective are reciprocal links. A relevant reciprocal link is when you establish a link to a site, and that same site links back to you. It's also important to keep links that are relevant to your site. In a way you build an agreement with the webmaster to help each other by posting a link to each others site.

Links can be added in two ways, manually and automatically. For those who would love to add over 100,000 links to their site…??? Then have fun =)??

The way in which I add links to my own sites consists of using a service by

http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com/

I currently use their service to help build reciprocal links for my sites. It helps make the process go much faster!!