SEO Tips

SEO, or search engine optimization, might sound intimidating if you are just getting started in Internet Marketing, or if you just want to find a way to get more traffic to your business. However, most SEO is just common sense techniques, with only a bit of vodoo to get you the placement that you are looking for. We'll start off with the basics, and then move on up to the big stuff.

Chances are, if you're looking for SEO information, you've already heard about keywords. If so, just bare with me for a few minutes while I go over this. Keywords are words or phrases that you think customers or visitors will use to find your site. If you sell fishing gear, for example, you might have people looking for you for fishing pole, tackle, bait, etc. These are keywords that you will want to focus on in order to get relavant traffic. Relevant traffic is the type of traffic that is most likely to buy from your business, or be interested in the information that you have to offer.

Keywords can be single words or keyword phrases - phrases are usually a lot easier to get rankings for, since lots of people will go after single words, but not too many people are looking for a three word phrase that might pertain to your local area, or your particular specialty.

Once you've figured out the keywords that will work out the best for your particular type of business or site, you are going to want to put them to work. Keywords are very strong when you can reinforce them in various parts of your site, and here are the major areas that you want your keywords represented:

Your domain name - If you aren't going for your business name, try to get a domain name that contains your main keyword or keyword phrase. This will help you to get additional relevance in the eyes of the search engines.

Your URLS - If you are making static pages, or your CMS has the capability of using a MOD rewrite, you will want to include keyword or keyword phrases into the individual pages on your site.

Your Page Title - This is the part of the page that shows up above the address bar on your browser - the page title is a very important part to this entire process, especially if you don't have a domain name that has your keywords in it.

Your meta description - This is a part of the page that you won't see anywhere but the code, but google uses it for the part of the page that shows up in the search engine for the description of the page, so you'll want to make sure that you have something waiting to entice google.

Headings - If you use headings within the text of your site itself, you are going to want to represent your keywords in them.

Content - Of course, the most common sense SEO is having the keywords within the text itself. However, do not push the ratio of keywords to regular text to above 1%. This can oversaturate the keyword, make it read unnaturally, and in general just cause you problems.

The last part of common sense SEO is getting backlinks - along with your on page SEO, the backlinks are the most signficant part of getting your site up and through the rankings. Good authority sites with lots of backlinks from other sites in your niche are going to be preferred, and you are going to want to make sure that the anchor text, or text used to linkback to you, is relevant to your brand or keywords.

Obviously there's a lot more to SEO than just these tips - but these are the quickest, most common sense way to quickly get you on your SEO feet and out getting those rankings that you crave!