Improved Search Engine Placement

For The Beginner

My goal in this article is to give you the basics of search engine optimization so that you at least understand it and can make a decision as to whether this is something you want tackle yourself or should you hire a qualified professional to help you accomplish this task.; This and other articles on this website will help you to improve your relevancy and search engines rankings for the best results possible through proven search engine optimization techniques.

Udi Manber, Google vice president overseeing search quality, in response to a question about webpage content evolving to be more search engine friendly explained, "It's definitely still lacking. I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages." Popular Mechanics - April 16, 2008

Why is search engine optimization (SEO) so important? SEO is important because this will make your website relative to your keywords during the search engine ranking process and will lead to improved search engine ranking. This is the reason why some businesses hire an SEO company to do this task.

You can get information on search engine optimization related services anywhere on the internet. However, few are really showing you how to work out an inexpensive and affordable plan for improved search engine placement. Some companies will even use antiquated techniques that may slow the process down. Others will play on your ignorance to charge you lots of money for things you can do simply and easily on your own for free. Good affordable search engine optimization will help you to start improving the search engine placement and ranking of your website and start driving traffic to it in a matter of days or weeks with expensive processes.

It is important to be patient, at first as you optimize your website and put your website in a position to be noticed by the search engines, you well get page indexed in the search engines before you ever get a page rank from Google. From you keyword choices and keyword density, if done right and done well, you will start to see your site ranking for some key words and some traffic coming to your website, but still now page rank from Google. Google will put you in a "sandbox" for a period of time to see if you are going to stay around and how popular you get in terms of websites linking to you. At some point google will bring you out of that "sandbox" and if you have done a good job you will start to see a page rank develop. This website is almost entirely made up of words so the keyword density is pretty good. this website took approximately four and one have months to come out of Google's "sandbox" and then immediately had a page rank of 3 attesting to the good search engine optimization that had been done both onsite and offsite. After that the combination of page rank and keyword density and fresh content will continue to help it improve it's search engine placement.

Search engine optimization begins optimally on your website, as you plan and build it. If it was not done then you are not too late, you can do it after you have it built and go back and revise it to improve the exposure to the search engines and still lead to improved search engine placement. It consists of the following elements referred to as "onsite optimization".

• Keyword Research - choosing the primary and secondary keywords you will use on your website.
• Implementing the keywords naturally into important elements in the website header and body.

Keyword Research and Usage

Let's start first with keyword research. Why is keyword research important? The keyword research helps us to find the keywords that connect us with our targeted audience. They are the words that we want to use on our website in a variety of ways to build relevancy on our page so when search engines find our website and view / crawl our page, they will then index us for those keywords. Once that happens, then when those keywords are typed into the search engine by potential customers, the search engine will then display our site in the search results, which is how they tie us to our targeted audience.

Ideally you will use a reverse search tool that will enable you to type in words you think are keywords people would search for and which will tell you the number of times those keywords were searched for over a given period of time. Depending on the tool you are using and the databases and the search engines they have access to for their search results you will get different numbers in your reverse search results. Your search engine optimization professional will know and have access to these tools and which ones are appropriate for specific uses. These tools can significantly speed up the process of onsite optimization lead to quicker improved search engine placement.

One tool you can use for manual research is Keyword Discovery's "Free Search Term Suggestion Tool" at www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. It will limit your results to 100 keywords for any given search. Another manual search tool is SEOBook.com's Suggestion tool at http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword. Both of these manual reverse search tools will allow you to find the keywords that people type into the search engines and how many times they were searched for. Remember keywords are how we connect with our targeted audience.

How Do I Use My Keywords

Once we have identified the keywords, next we need to know where and how to use them for improved search engine placement. The first and arguably the most important place to use our keywords would be the title tag for your website. The title tag appears in the header of the page and is the first opportunity we have to tell the search engine what our page is about.

The title tag should be 60 - 80 characters in length and use one or two of the most important and/or relevant keywords for that page and possibly your domain name, especially if your domain name includes keywords in it. The title tag information appears in the blue header bar at the top of the window and is also used as the title of our listing when our site is displayed in the natural or organic search results.

The meta description should be about 2 - 3 sentences or up to about 200 characters that describe for the customer and the search engine what the website is about. In the natural or organic search engine results, if it is well written, this description will be the first choice for the text the search engine displays beneath the title in the search results. This description does not appear on the website page when the website is displayed for the visitor but is readable by the search engine and used in the search results primarily.

A third meta tag is the keywords meta tag which is also not displayed to the visitor of the website. The keywords meta tag is a hold over from early methods of search engine optimization, but because it was abused by website developers it is seldom use by search engines. We still use the keywords meta tag, but most search engines ignore it due to the previous abuses. Some search engines may still evaluate it and you never know when search engines may start to use it again. The Keywords meta tag is simply a list of up to approximately 12 keyword phrases separated by commas.

Meta tags require the knowledge of some Hypertext Mark-Up Language (HTML) coding if you are not using a web site builder that simplifies the process. For instance the title description and keywords tags would look something like this to the search engine and in the programming code that creates the page. Even if you use a builder and later look at the web page source understanding this HTML code will help you to identify it on your page or a competitors web page as well.

<title>Search Engine Optimization Basics at UtahSEOExpert.com</title>

<meta name="description" content="Basic search engine optimizations concept presented to give business owners and website developers and understanding of good SEO techniques...">

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword phrase1,keyword phrase 2,keyword phrase3,...">

Your keywords used in the title, description and keywords tags now need to be used on the page to validate to the search engine that your page is actually about what you told the search engine that your page is relevant to. If the search engine doesn't see any of the keywords on your page, then it can only assume that your page is not relevant relevant to the words you used in the title, description and keywords tags in the header area of the web site.

With new technologies arriving on the scene we have things like flash that designers are using to build beautiful websites with motion and sound and are very pleasing to look at, but if the entire site is built with flash then it is like a picture. Search engines can only read the text on the pages so images and flash movies have no value for search engine optimization aside from the visual aspect that the human sees on the page. Flash and pictures can be used to enhance a website but the site must have text in order to build relevance for the search engines.

Now that we know that we need text on the page how can we use that text to help emphasize the relevancy of the keywords on the page? Mechanisms such as header tags for headings using keywords will give more emphasis to keywords. Hyperlinks where the anchor text is a keyword phrase will add relevance to the keyword phrase. Bolding and italics also draw some attention to the keywords for the search engine. Each page needs to have enough text on it to allow that page to demonstrate the relevance of the keywords it displays in the header of the page to the search engine, if true search engine optimization is to be achieved.

Lets take a look at some of the other tags mentioned in the previous paragraph. Header tags alert the search engine to more important text on the page, much like the headline on the page of newspaper does to the reader. A header tag is a tag that contain a "H" and a number between 1 and 7. The lower the number the larger the text and the more important it is to the search engine. H1 tags can be formatted using font tags to control the size or .css files to control the formatting. The following is a simple example of a header tag:

<H1>This is the header text to be emphasized</H1>

Notice that the header is finalized with the "</H1>" to tell the browser where the end of the header is located. The HTML tags can be in either upper or lower case.

Bolding can be performed by using the <b>This is the bolded text</b> and italics are created by using <i>This is the text in italics</i>.

Hyperlinks are a little more complicated consisting of two components. The first component is the link destination represented by the term "href" referring to the hyperlink reference and the anchor text located between the beginning and ending anchor tags. An anchor tag is an "<a>" in angle brackets and ending with "</a>" The beginning tag also include the destination reference, for example.

<a href="http://seoexpertpro.com">SEO Expert Pro</a>

The a line above, when interpreted by a browser, would appear like "SEO Expert Pro" and when the anchor text SEO Expert Pro  are clicked on they would take you to the destination website http://seoexpertpro.com.

The text in red is the destination reference, the text in Green is the "anchor text" or the text that the viewer would click on to move to the destination page, and the blue text show the hyperlink tag, link tag or "anchor tag".

As we use these structures in combination in a natural way we then are able to help the search engine to know what our page is about and also create a page that is functional for the user.

To optimize your website well for the search engines you should use unique meta tags on each page on your website. The keywords should be used in:

• The title tag (Big Three)
• Meta description
• Meta keywords
• Header tag (Big Three)
• Opening paragraph about 4%
• Alt tags on about 3 images
• Link / anchor text or hyperlinks (Big Three)
• Body of the page about 4% (visible text)
  
• Closing paragraph about 4%

They should be used in such a way as to feel natural on the page. If the page feels awkward then look for ways to reword the information on the page and make sure you are not forcing the keywords in too many times. This in combination with other activities to build your page rank are the best way to get your page listed on page one of the search engines.

These strategies are what we call onsite page optimization. Each page needs to have its own unique page optimization for the content on that page. Don't make the mistake of using the same title, description and keywords meta tags for every page on your site.

Another category which we will discuss elsewhere is offsite search engine optimization. Look for the topics up coming on link popularity and link strategies, social bookmarking, directory listings, article submission and much much more. These offsite techniques are also very important to improve search engine placement of your web site.

Visit www.technorati.com/ping and build a Technorati Profile and have Technorati ping your website for content and to start promoting it.

We strive to provide only quality articles, so if there is a specific topic related to search engine optimization and improved search engine placement that you would like us to cover, please contact us at any time.

And again, thank you to those contributing daily to our search engine optimization website.