If you want to improve your website and get better web site traffic, and more rankings in the search engines, you might try to learn seo. I found seo advice to be as confusing as Chinese, but luckily, I stumbled into the right crowd, who knew what really works, and they put me on a path that works better than almost all the advice I see promoted around the Internet.

So first off, what is the single most important thing you can do to improve your website?

Fix your website!

I don't mean your website is broken, but so many websites are completely mixed up, and have no clear direction on getting the search engines, or visitors, to understand what the site is about.

So, first off...put your keyword in your title.

What's a title? It's that thing you read at the top of your browser...way at the very, very top. For a normal website, this is a tag inside the "head" area of the web page...but for most sites, they are made using another website, or tool that asks you what to name your page. Be sure to put your chosen keyword in your title!

(if you don't know about keywords, go over to google and type "google keyword tool" and you'll see what it is all about).

Next off is "put your keyword in your headline".

The headline is that big text that usually goes at the top of your page. Also, be sure NOT to use big "H1" headlines all over your page...that confuses the search engines (and visitors).

Are you starting to get this stuff? Put keywords in important places.

Kinda simple, right?

The next piece is "make your website look good to search engine spiders". What this means is, if you looked at the code behind your page (using the "view source" command in most browsers), you would see what the spider sees. If it has too much javascript or other mumbo jumbo code, then the spiders might get caught trying to read it. The spiders don't like complicated stuff.

So if you have some of that code stuff, get your webmaster to move it into separate files, so the search engine spiders can find the stuff you are writing about.

Next step is to fill your page with relevant useful content. I am sure your page already has this stuff...otherwise why would you put up a site at all, right?

So put up your useful content, and make sure it stays focused on the keyword you chose. If you want to write about other stuff, make a new page dedicated to that other stuff, and link to it.

The next big step in this seo guide is external links. This means getting other sites to link to you, and get them to use your keywords for the link text. If you choose "boulder seo" as your page theme and keyword, then get them to link to you like this: boulder seo. It's that easy! Of course, you can use article publishing and distribution if you want to give others a reason to link to you, since your useful content will be useful to others too, and they will publish it, along with the links you include in your resource box (the little "about" box you get to put at the end of any article you write).

If you are using a content management system like wordpress, then you are in luck - wordpress is pre-configured to do seo stuff pretty well, and all you need to do is change the way it creates the links for each post (hint: %category%/%postname% is a good way to set up a custom link in wordpress).

If you decide to focus on keyword seo, meaning you get a top ranking in a search engine for a given keyword, then follow the seo tips above, and put the keyword in your title and headline, and write relevant useful stuff on your page. If you have pictures, be sure to include an "alt tag" (an alternative written description for each picture), and the search engine spiders will look at that in order to understand what the picture is about.

SEO ekyword research is a big market, and there are many ways you can go about doing that. Honestly, I get confused by all the options for keyword research, since most services give a lot of data, and when I put it to use, I find it completely false - they say certain keywords are getting traffic, but they get little or no traffic. So what I recommend is sticking with the google keyword tool, and trying out what it says is getting traffic. You can also check out Google trends - http://www.google.com/trends to see if it shows any traffic charts for a given keyword (you may need to try a few keywords to get any chart to show).

It seems the big place for seo is in Colorado. I see quite a few companies in Denver, Boulder, and other towns near those Rocky mountains. I guess the fresh air helps clear the mind to think clearly.

Some people ask me about adsense seo - what they can do to better monetize their adsense sites. I tell them to move everything to wordpress, get some good plugins, and set up the settings for seo, and then post useful content on a regular basis. There is nothing better for getting adsense traffic that useful content.

If you want to move your adsense seo into the next level, look into something called "user generated content" - that is a site with a forum or other web 2.0 system on it, that lets a bunch of people to add content and generate new pages. Super powerful when your goal is to get more adsense clicks!

Learning seo can be complicated if you get distracted into stuff that doesn't work. Personally, I hate short term black hat seo stuff, as it is like you need to start over again and again. So stick with white hat seo stuff, and your efforts will last a long time - a much better result, believe me.

What is the best seo in the world? I would have to say outsourcing to a very professional yet very cheap company that knows what to do! There is no better top seo tip than saying to a pro "go build up this website", and having it get more popular with more top rankings.

Those that want to get a little more sophisticated in their keyword research might want to consider elite keyword research, the basis of which is a tool you can get which does all sorts of powerful things, like find the keywords a certain website is targeting. If you are focused on ecommerce seo, I'd go this route.

I am including some links down below which I think will really help you in your journey learning about seo.

Check the videos, too - very useful!