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This is intended as a guide to Search Engine Optimization
or simply SEO. What I will cover are the basics steps
you should take when optimizing your website for certain
keywords. Let's get started.
Selecting Key Words or Phrases
In my opinion this is the most important part of search
engine optimization. You first need to select the keyword/s
for your site, so that when someone types them into a
search engine your web site will appear. Now don't just
pick some word or phrase out of the blue, you need to
do some research first. You can use the tool below or
a similar tool from somewhere else.
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Keyword Suggestion Tool
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Let's say you own a web site about pets. You want to select a
key phrase that will bring in some nice traffic, but you don't
want to pick a phrase that is unattainable. For instance the word
"pet" is searched 22, 000 each day, if you can land
that word you have hit the jackpot. But realistically you'll never
get it without spending thousands of dollars hiring a SEO company
to do it for you and even then it will take many months to get
a page 1 result if ever.
So instead you should select a phrase that has some nice traffic
and is attainable to you. I wouldn't attempt anything over the
2,000/day search, even that is pretty high. Look for something
around 200-500 if your starting out.
Domain Name
Domain name is important but not crucial. Going back to the Pet
site example, if your site is about Pet Products then naturally
you want those words in the domain name. The best would be either
"Pet-Products.com" or "PetProducts.com". The
hyphen does not affect the domain name in search engines. If you
can't get a domain with your keywords, then get creative. HotPetProducts.com
would be ok.
Like I said, the domain is not crucial, you can still obtain
page 1 results even if your domain name has nothing to do with
your page, but it does help.
Title Tag
Very overlooked part of search engine optimization. If your site
is about Pet Products then the first 2 words in your Title tag
should be Pet Products, regardless of what your actually web site
name is.
Steve's Pets - Pet Products
Is NOT as effective as
Pet Products - Steve's Pets
Meta Tags
No longer as important as they once were, some search engines
are rumored no not use them at all in their search algorithms,
but every little thing helps. Minimally, I would make sure you
have description and keyword meta tags.
In your description tag, make sure that your keyword or phrase
is somewhere in the beginning, preferably the first word/s in
the sentence.
For your keyword tag, you can use a keyword suggestion tool that
will help you select good keywords in addition to your main keyword
or phrase.
Keyword Suggestion Tool
http://www.iwebtool.com/keyword_suggestion
Meta Tages are placed in the HEAD section of your HTML code. Heres
something I might use if I was going after Pet Products as the
keyword.
<meta name="Description" content="Pet products
at Steve's Pets. We have all your pet product needs and more.">
<meta name="Keywords" content="pet products,
pets, pet, pet product, dogs, cats, dog products, cat products">
I would probably list a few more keywords in the meta tag, but
I'm sure you get the point so I'll move on.
Header Tags
Heading tags are used by search engines, to identify words which
are more important than the rest of the page text. The point of
this is that the heading tags will sum up the topic of the page,
so they are counted as important keywords. Again if your site
is about Pet Products then somewhere at the top of your main page
you want to have Pet Products in H1 tags. Header Tags range from
H1-H6. H1 should summarize the whole page, H2 for sections, H3
for subsections. I've never used anything higher then H3 as they
don't have much effect for SEO.
To use header tags simply place <h1>Your key phrase</h1>
in your HTML page.
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