Understanding SEO

Understanding SEO or search engine optimization as it is otherwise known is a very important step in understanding how your website ranks in the search engines. This article is going to show you what search engine optimization is and how you can do it to maximize your websites positioning within the search engines. If we take the term internet marketing and do a search on Google you would find that there are currently 95,000,000 websites all trying to get on page 1 of Google. So what makes the difference? why are some websites on page 1 while others are on page 980. If you really think about it if you want to get some traffic from the search engines then you really need to be placed on either pages 1, 2 or 3 as most people don't click beyond this point when searching for something. If you go to Google and do a search for internet marketing then lets have a look at one of the sites and try and work out why they are on page 1 of Google for that term. There is a site at number 3 position called majon.com we will have a look at that site to identify what type of seo or search engine optimization they have done to get to page 1 of Google. On opening up this site I can see straight away what they have done to optimize their site they have chosen keywords or keyword phrases all done in bold and italic font. This is a must. If you have a website and have built it around a chosen keyword then you need to use wordtracker or the keyword selector tool in adwords to work out what other keywords are in the same cluster as your chosen keyword or keyword phrase. An example would be make money online, when you search this term you also get things like make money at home, make money fast, make money online ideas, making money, make money jobs, affiliate programs, etc. Once you have your main keyword and about 10 sub keywords or phrases you then need to optimize your site by making those words or phrases stand out to the search engines. You do this by using bold, italic or underline tags or all three like this <b><i><u>your chosen keyword or phrase in here</b></i></u> so it would look like this make money online Also you can use alt tags on your images to add more keyword density to your site. Meaning if you have an image instead of it being < img src=" http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com/image.jpg " alt="internet marketing ideas" >(please note I had to put some gaps in so you could see the code). What you can see is the image now has a name and it is a keyword phrase associated with internet marketing. You cannot use the same term over and over for images you must use a variety of alt tags. When checking out your competition always right mouse click on their website and have a look at the source of their site you can find out an amazing amount just by having a look. You can see what type of alt tags they are using whether or not they allow their site to follow or use the no follow rule. You can see how they use header and title tags. It is recommended that you use header tags<H1> for your title </H1>or chosen main keyword and then use the H2 and H3 tags for your main keyword phrases. You can see that if you use correct header tags and use your keyword well throughout your site by highlighting them to the search engines then you will notice your rankings increase dramatically. SEO or search engine optimization is using a multitude of methods to make your site more search engine friendly than your competitors. You need to always stay one step ahead of your competition so I strongly recommend you do a search for your chosen keyword and check out your competition why are they on page 1 of Google and you are not! Another important point is do they have many links you can check this by just putting links: infront of the url you are checking on Google it is interesting to note that majon.com only has 3 links on google so this is not the reason they are on page 1 of Google for the term internet marketing. You may be surprised to see a site on page 1 of Google with so few links but it just goes to show you that properly optimizing your website will reap you many rewards and the most powerful reward is free website traffic. One other fine detail in search engine optimization or SEO is to have your chosen keyword/ keyword phrases and also make then pages on your site. So write a post on the exact phrase or keyword you have optimized your site for and use the keyword selector tool in Google to work out what other titles you should have this all adds value to your search engine optimization of your website, why pay someone else to do it if you can do it yourself I always say. Let me know how well you go with your optimization of your site, especially how well you increase your position for your chosen keyword.