In What is SEO? Part 1 you learned what SEO means and is
and you learned what Search Engines are and how they work.
Now you will learn more about some basics and techniques
that professionals do to optimize a website for the search
engines:
Keyword/Phrase Research - this step is key in the SEO
process and should be first above any other step. First,
you need to find the keywords/phrases that you think a
person would search for to find your website. Really you
are researching keywords that are targeted and relevant to
your market. Next you will research the traffic volume or
popularity of the keywords/phrases, this is essential
because it would be pointless to optimize your website for
a keyword or phrase that gets zero (0) searches. Next you
will research the Competition of the keywords or keyphrases
that you have chosen. If a keyword/phrase is too
competitive you have to analyze whether or not it is worth
optimizing. The reason for this is simple, if you have
chosen the keyword "Real Estate" then you have a huge task
ahead of you. We are not saying that you can't get ranked
on the first page of the major search engines for this
keyword but you have to decide if it is worth the time and
effort. Choose keywords/phrases that are unique and yet are
attainable.
Url/Domain Name Optimization - Once you have found your
main keyword you are going to focus on the next step, which
is to decide what your Domain name is going to be. You
might ask, "What is a Domain Name?" A Domain Name is the
name that a person would type into a web-browser to visit
your website e.g. www.yourdomainnamehere.com. To optimize
your Domain Name you will want to find something that is
short, targeted to your market, explains your site, and
uses the main keyword you have chosen through your Keyword
Research. So for example if your keyword was "Real Estate"
then you would want to use those keywords in your domain
name. Some may argue that using the keywords in your domain
name is to general and doesn't brand your company. This is
for you to decide, but it is proven at least for now that
the Search Engines use the domain name text in their
algorithms of how they see your site's relevancy to the
search criteria. Note: The domain name you choose needs to
be available to purchase. On-Page Optimization - another
important step of optimizing your website is optimizing the
web pages that the user and the spiders see. Now this is
the trickiest part of SEO because you want to optimize your
site for the Search Engine Spiders but you also want to
optimize your site for your users/visitors. The best rule
of thumb is to lean toward optimizing your site for the
users first because more and more the search engines are
looking at your site as if a human was, this is called
Latent Semantic Indexing, optimize as natural as possible.
So on-page optimization uses the following techniques:
* Content Optimization
* Keyword Placement (Frequency, Density, Proximity, etc.)
* Title Tag Optimization
* Meta Tag Optimization
* Spider/Robot Tag Optimization
* Image Alt Optimization
* Internal Link Structure
* 301 Redirects
* Robot.txt Creation
* Broken Links & Page Optimization
* Site Mapping
* Avoiding Specific Design Optimization Issues (Graphic,
Flash, Dynamic, Frameset, and Javascript only Sites)
Off-Page Optimization - As important as any of the other
steps of SEO, Off-page optimization is key to your success.
Think of it this way the search engines want to see how
popular your website is to the online world. This strategy
of off-page optimization is where you optimize your website
off the pages of your site. Link Building is most important
to the off-page optimization process. Link Building is
where you get a link back to your website on someone else's
site. The important step is to have your keyword within the
anchor text of the link not just simply putting
www.mydomainname.com as the link text. Getting links from
Authority Sites (high traffic and highly ranked sites) is
also very important again letting the search engines know
that your site is popular. Most importantly with link
building is getting links from sites that are relevant to
your website and your keywords/phrases, if you for example
get 100 links from Health Care websites and your Keyword is
targeted toward "Real Estate" then the search engines won't
think you are really that popular or relevant to the
criteria of "Real Estate". Note: Getting links from
irrelevant sites is not bad just not going to optimize your
off-page process. Here are some of the important items of
off-page optimization:
* Link Building (One Way and Reciprocal Links)
* Link Baiting (Luring others to want to link to your
website)
* Article Submissions (Keyword rich content with links back
to your website submitted to Article Directories)
* Press Release Submission (Optimized content with keywords
& links, and also a great Link Baiting opportunity)
* Directory Submissions
* Search Engine Submission (Submitting your website to the
search engines saying, "Spiders come look at my site, I
have food for you.")
* Sitemap Submissions
Monitoring Search Engine Rankings (Analytics) - One
important skill in SEO is measuring the results of applying
some of the basic SEO techniques that we have mentioned
above. To be a successful Search Engine Optimization
professional you must Test, Test, and Test again. Patience
is another quality that someone doing SEO must possess. You
need to realize that you will not see results in one (1) or
two (2) days actually you must be prepared to begin waiting
and it could take time to see results maybe for two (2) to
even (6) months. A quick way to see if you website is even
seen (indexed) by the search engines is by typing
site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com into the search engine, if
your site is indexed in the search engine you will see
results in the query if not you will see "Your search -
site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com - did not match any
documents". The manual way to monitor your rankings is
simply typing in your keyword/phrase you are trying to rank
for and search through the search engine results until you
find your website. There are tools that you can use to
monitor your rankings. Web analytics measures your online
activity such as how much traffic your website is
receiving, from where, and also measuring conversion. The
most famous and may we add free Web analytic software is
Google Analytics. This free web analytics tool is very
robust giving you the geographic, trends, exit pages, and
referrers of where your traffic is coming from and leaving
from.
Now we hope you have learned some key terms, techniques,
and basics of what Search Engine Optimization is and how it
affects your business and even your life.
So "What is SEO?" well have given you some of the very
basics above in this article but we realize that there is
much much more to SEO than just these things and you must
keep up on all the changes and updates of the Search
Engines.
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To Learn More about SEO Just Visit
http://www.LearnSEOLive.com
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