Search Engine Optimization Made Easy

Search Engine Optimization is the collective term for the steps that you take when designing your website to try to get it to rank as highly as possible in the search engines. By following these guidelines you can complete your own search engine optimization on your websites and avoid paying someone to do this for you. Many people are scared of this as it is somewhat technical but it can be broken down into small, simple steps.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves choosing the most appropriate targeted keywords and phrases that relate to your website or blog. The entire goal of this process is to ensure that your page(s) rank highly in search engines. This means that when someone searches for the keywords or phrases that you have targeted, the search engine shows your site on top. At a minimum you want your page to show on the first page of any search, especially Google. The other popular search engines are Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

SEO is the art of fine tuning the content and text of your website along with the HTML and Meta tags. Your Website’s title and description should focus on the keywords or phrase that you are targeting. Do not try to target too many words or phrases, keep it simple and targeted. Use free keyword tools to find the most relevant and widely search words and phrases that are relevant to your website.

Search engines keep ranking algorithms secret, as they need to ensure that spam pages and site do not clog their results. This means a website with only the one word or phrase listed 1000 times will not get ranked. Hundreds of different factors or used when search engines are ranking the pages and each one is different. This difference is so great that a particular page may rank number 1 on Google but 100 on Yahoo. It is important also to know that each search engine may change it’s methods regularly to ensure that only the most relevant pages are displayed.

You do no need to submit your sites to search engines – they automatically trawl the internet looking for the most relevant sites to list.

Link building and generating backlinks is a great way to get ranked quickly. A quick way to do this is to establish a link exchange with a high page rank site where you display their link on your site and they display your link on their site. One link from a high page rank website can get the search engines to visit your site and begin to spider its contents. This process can take up to a couple of weeks or even sometimes as quick as a couple of days!

I do not promote the use of SEO marketing and promotion companies, although some people may chose to use these. All I would say is to be careful with this and look into the plan they have for your site and how much this will cost you.