3 simple steps that are easy to remember will reveal
just how easy search engine optimization can be once you know how. There are many websites that will complicate SEO by referring to engine algorithms, page rank formulas, key-word density or what have you. This article will not
dwell anything that technical. Lets leave the theorists and bloggers to do what they do best and argue till the cows come home. In the meantime we can work towards getting your webpage up into the top 10 results at Google, MSN
and Yahoo.
There are only three simple steps of the SEO equation to remember:
- Choose to target search terms that are not hotly contested by competitors.
- Optimize your page content and html for those terms.
- Actively seek external, one-way, incoming links with the targeted key terms as the anchor text.
Let’s take a look at those 3 steps in greater detail.
Choose to target search terms that are not hotly contested by competitors.
Why..? Would you rather spin the roulette wheel and take your chances against high-rolling competitors, who
throw tonnes of cash into professional SEO and advertising campaigns; or get qualified traffic hitting your site now? Websites targeting the most popular search terms are small fish in a big pond. By targeting less popular terms
with fewer possible search results, you become a bigger fish in a smaller pond.
Lets take an extreme example. Your a commercial web host and you want your site optimized for search engines. With Google, the search phrase ‘web hosting’ returns 23 million results. That’s a lot of competition; small fish in a big pond remember. How about ‘commercial website hosting’? Well you have about 9 million other pages to compete with there. The phrase ‘webhosting specials’ only returns 1.2 million results. So how many other pages do you want to compete against, 23 million or 1.2 mil?
There are a few convenient tools around for selecting your search terms. To find how many search-result competitors exist for related terms, check out Google’s keyword suggest.
Once you’ve narrowed down a list of candidates, head on over to the Overture’s site and start up a dummy account. The key-word suggest tool is invaluable for gaining an insight to what people punch into search engines and how
many hits these terms are scoring at Overture per month. Your looking for a sweet spot of say 5-10% of the result pages that your industry’s hottest terms return.
Optimize your page content and html for your new terms. The most logical page to optimize first time round is your homepage. There are factors that play into SEO which are heavily dependant on how many external websites link to your page. The most common link you are going to score from other sites is the default homepage, so it follows that this is the best place to start. The most critical part of your web page is behind the scenes in the html. Particularly important is the header and it’s relationship to the rest of your html.
Your website should include 3 important tags in the head. They include title, meta description, and meta key-words. It’s important to have the title as the first tag in the head, with the 2 mentioned metas soon following. Stuffing
your head tags with other metas and clutter such as lengthy javascript can only harm your search engine results page ranking (SERPs); clutter will never improve it.