Search Engine Optimization Basics

There are many things to consider when writing for SEO. Fist most people still think that SEO tactics only apply to your personal websites. This could not be more incorrect. Everything you do you should keep in mind  these techniques and tactics. Articles and Press Releases are prime examples.

There are many things that factor into your placement on Google. Here are a few to keep in mind.

• Google PR (Page Rank): This is a rank from 1 to 8 as to how important Google thinks your website is. The higher the number the better. Higher PR means Google will visit your site more often looking for new content and updates. 4 and 5 are very good rankings. I have only seen a couple of 8’s. Higher ranking will also mean if all content on the page is similar and you are competing for a position the higher ranked page will most likely be above the lower ranked page.
  • http://www.digpagerank.com  – Accurate Page rank Checker
• Keyword Density: This is the amount of times a searched phrase or word is on your page or in your article. This will be a percentage of the total words on the page. IE: 100 word on the page gas appears 6 times the density for gas is 6%.
• Back Links: This is important and it will also affect your Google PR ranking. Back links are a link out on the web that points to your website. So every article you write should have back links to your site in it. The more links to your website Google finds the more important Google thinks your site is.
  • http://google.com/webmasters/tools  – Check backlinks and various Google stats
  • http://www.backlinkwatch.com  – Backlink Checker, almost as good as Google webmaster tools.
• Anchor Text of Back Links: This is another over looked area. Here is an example. www.grnpaydayteam.com is a back link to my site. The anchor text is www.grnpaydayteam.com when you click it it takes you there. So both the anchor and back link is www.grnpaydayteam.com . This link Home Business has an anchor text of Home Business but the back link is www.grnpaydayteam.com . See the difference? If Google knows you have 100 back links with the anchor gas prices and the other guys competing for position only have 5 you will have a better chance of being placed above them.
• Competition: Know what your the people you are competing against are doing. Get results of there site. find out how many back links they have.
• Title Keywords: Use keywords again here. Try to keep it at 66 charters including spaces that is all most search engines will display.
• Bold and Italics Keywords: Bold and Italic your keywords on the page a couple of times. Don’t get carried away here. too much is not better as a rule I only do it once per page.
• Keyword Placement: Try and position your target keyword or phrase as the first and last thing the spiders will read when they hit your site. Also put your target phrase in a <H1> tag. Spiders read the HTML code from top to bottom so if  you have a menu on the left make sure your keyword phrase is on the page before the menu. You can set up a table on your site correctly to have the search engines read this first.
• Traffic Ranking: Google likes sites that get a lot of traffic. Alexa ranks your site for traffic and page views on a daily basis. Alexa is not the tell all there are some problems with the results Alexa kicks out  but it is a good baseline. By some good bulk traffic. The traffic may not buy anything but it will get your exposure up, when buying bulk traffic be sure to buy if from the county or area you are promoting too.
• Meta Tags: These are tags that tell the search engine about your page. These are very important for good rankings on your personal site. These go in the head section of your html code. If you don’t know what this means learn to write simple HTML you need to know it in this industry.
  • Robots: Tells the spiders to follow links and whether or not to index them.
    • <meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />
  • Content: is important to complex search engines like Google. This tag tells the spider what type of page you are posting, which helps the search engine categorize the listing. It also shows that you are following the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines, which could be an indication of a site being “optimized”. Here is the syntax used on this page:
    • <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
  • Description: This is what will be displayed on the search engine results page as a description. Keep it short and accurate to the page. Be sure to use your target keywords first in the description.
    • <meta name=”description” content=”your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product service or organization.” />
  • Keywords: This is a tag that tells the search engines what your page is about you want to have variations of your target keyword in here.
    • <meta name=”keywords” content=”top 10 seo tips, what is seo, resources, seo software, seo ebook, search engine optimization” />
• Attributes: Use title and Alt attributes on your images file names and links that contain your keywords. . If you have a image on you page give it an alt tag.
  • <Img src=”http://wemaketopearners.com/img/gas price img 1.jpg” alt=”Gas Price Image”> in this example the image name is gas price 1.jpg the alt tag is the same. Name  your page gasprices.htm
• Site Map: Create a site map that will index and list ever page on your site on a single page. Search engines love this plus they can easily find and index all of your pages. Also install Google Sitemaps.
• Robot.txt file: This is a quick and easy addition it tells the spiders what to do when they get to your site.

Now that we have the basics out of the way. LOL Yes those are the basics. You can see there are a ton of factors that determine your sites placement in Google. Keep in mind you will need to do this for every page you want to try and index. It is more complicated getting a site indexed well than just a article you write. You can scrap everything above if you are just writing an article or press release.

Now lets talk about how to write the content correctly.

1. Have a focus or topic for your writing: The bulk of the work here as far as SEO goes is going to be done before you even start writing any content at all. The first thing you need to do pick a topic your topic is vague. A broad scope. Lets say you want to write about easing the burden of high gas prices by starting a home based business. This is a great topic as it is all over the news right now. So your topic is actually High Gas Prices.
2. Research your topic and the related keywords for your topic.  So make a list of all related keywords. IE: Gas Prices, Gas Price Increase, Fuel Price, Oil Cost per barrel, ETC get a good list maybe 15 or 20 keyword phrases.
   • Now we need to learn about these keywords. there are 3 services I am going to recommend some of these have free trials. They will all accomplish the task at hand. I have no preference. . Word Tracker, Word ZE and Web CEO these are all keyword research tools Web CEO is a software that you download for free you can get limited use to try it out. You will need to pay for it to get the complete use which you will need. inventory.overture.com used to be a great free resource but they seem to have taken it offline.
   • Pick one of these program and type in your keywords. You are looking for search terms and phrases that are related to your key words. You will most likely not be targeting “gas prices” in your article. but you may be targeting “high gas prices” or “what to do about rising gas prices”. So how do you determine this. When you run a search through the services above on your keyword they will return results of the most searched phrases that match gas prices. Since “gas prices” is probably going to be highly search it is likely to be a targeted keyword. So when I did a search on results I noticed with Web CEO I noticed there was 19 million people competing for the term gas prices, but only 1 million for gasoline prices. This could be a good keyword to use. I still want to check out all the other words. In my list. I am looking for a highly searched keyword that does not have a lot of competition. This could be an entire phrase like how to find low gas prices. The tools above will help you find this phrase.
   • Now you have your phrase. Next you need to research that phrase. Go to Google and do a search on your phrase. Now take every result that is on page one and look at it. see if there is an article or write up on the page. If there is you will use a keyword density  tool to see how many times your target phrase appears on the page.
   • Here are a couple tools. Do  a Google search for more to use “Keyword Density” find one you like. I use SEO Elite and Keyword Elite for all of my research. These are costly but are the best I have found. These free tools below will work ok as well. If you are really going to attack SEO I strongly suggest SEO Elite and Keyword Elite.
     • http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
     • http://www.keyworddensity.com/
     • http://developers.evrsoft.com/seotool/
   • Find the density of your phrase on the top ranked sites. Then you will want to write your article keeping similar density just try to beat them a little. If the normal density is around 4.2% write your article and try to get 4.5% don’t kill yourself here. You just don’t want to be way above or way below the average. There are many factors that determine organic placement.