The first few lines of your website pages are what the search engine show to your visitors when they are searching for your keywords.

Search engines use this as an introduction of your site to your potential visitors to see if your site relates to what they want.

It is important to insert your main keyword at least twice in the first few lines of your page. Then once you pass the first few lines, you can then include your main keyword once of twice without overdoing it or trying to fool the search engine as we have discussed earlier.

Keywords and keyword selection

One of the most important terms in SEO is keywords.

A keyword is a word or concept which has a special significance in your business. This type of word may be used to describe your business and should have relevance to what you do. An example would be a review website with URL www.SupremeReviewsForHomeBasedBusiness.com.

In the above URL, ‘Reviews’ is the keyword that has relevancy for someone that wants to visit a review website and ‘ForHomeBasedBusiness’ describe what type of reviews you can get when you visit this site.

Keywords and links (and great content, of course) are the primary factors for SEO success. Keywords are the first criteria search engines use to calculate relevancy. Because of this, the more keywords, and synonyms your content has, the higher its position with search engines. One of the first steps to SEO success is keyword selection.

Obviously, you can’t rank high for every single keyword under the Sun, and you need to concentrate on 5-6 major keywords and 10-15 minor keywords, which describe your site best.

Some great keyword selection tool you can use to get good keywords: –

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

 

Keyword density

The next criterion for search relevancy is keyword density. Keyword density is measured is percentage of how many times your keyword or phrase appears in your webpage compare to the total number of words in your page – i.e., if there are 100 words on your page and you have your keyword 6 times, your keyword density is 6%).

Keyword density is also used to determine your page relevancy to a particular keyword. Too many of your keyword in your page can be a problem because the search engine might think you are trying to stuff the page purposely with keywords.

Generally, the higher the density, the more relevant your page is but you should watch out that your keyword density is not suspiciously high (i.e., 10-15% or more) because if it is, this smells of keyword stuffing and there is a significant risk search engines will ban you for cheating. There are no written rules about the optimal keyword density, but many experts suggest 3-7% for major keywords and 1-3% for minor keywords.

How to position your keyword

In addition to keyword density, keyword positioning is another important factor.

Keyword positioning is where you place your keywords with your page. It is not the same if your keywords are in the page title, headings, first paragraph or if they are scattered all around the text.

Some areas like page title, heading and first paragraphs are more important than the body and knowing where your keyword will best benefit your page will help the search engine to locate your site faster and present your page to the people that want to see your site.

Some of the other techniques (in addition to placing your keywords in the page title, the headings and the first paragraph) are to use bold, italic, and/or larger font because when some piece of text is in bold, italic, and/or larger font it is supposed that this text is more important and therefore their keywords weigh more.

If you wonder if there is something better than having the right keywords in your page title, headings and the first paragraph, the answer is: Yes, there is.

The other place where you want to have your keyword is in the anchor text of a backlink.

Anchor text of a backlink

A backlink (or an inbound link) is a link from another site to your website or web page.

The number of backlinks your site gets indicates your sites’ popularity or your site is perceived to have a value of importance that the other website might derive from your site.

Some of these values could be to provide more information for their own visitors (something that you have that they don’t have, and think could help their visitors). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links or inlinks.

Backlinks use anchor text to link – the anchor text is the text, which the link is anchored to.

So, if we have the following link to mysite.com: check this!, ‘check this’ is the anchor text (or the text on which you click to open the link). The HTML code for this link will be the following:

<a href= ‘http://mysite.com’>check this! </a>

Having keywords in the anchor text of a backlink to your site is very important because it shows the relevancy of the link to your site in a descriptive way that is more meaningful to your visitor instead of just the URL.

First, a backlink to your site is important because the idea is that when other sites link to your site, this means that they like it and vote for it.

However, the quality of your backlinks is more important than their quantity.

For example, let say you have five backlinks from reputable sites with high Page Rank, this weighs more than having 15 backlinks from sites nobody has heard of.

In addition to backlinks, internal links (i.e., the links from one page on your site to the next) and their anchor are also important, so even if you are not successful in building backlinks, linking your pages internally is still a viable option.

Here comes the phrase again… ‘Content is King.’

SEO experts often say that ‘Content is King.’ Yes, this is true both in terms of natural traffic your great content can bring and in terms of SEO success (which also eventually brings organic traffic to your site).

Fresh, unique, and frequently updated content is what search engines (and your human visitors) really love and value high.

This is one more reason to keep on creating great content!

Images and movies, unlike text, cannot be indexed directly by search engines. Maybe someday search engines will be able to index audio and visual content directly but for now, if you do not provide a textual description of the movie or image in its <alt> tag, search engines won’t index this image/movie.

Because of this, you should always write (clear and concise) textual descriptions. For instance, here is how the HTML code for an image should look: <img src= ‘mypic.gif’ alt= ‘A picture of me at the seaside’>.

You can include keywords in the <alt> of your images and movies but avoid keyword stuffing – do not pack too many keywords in one sentence.

Meta-tags

Ten years ago, when search engines were not clever enough to be able to understand the meaning of pages they indexed, metatags were the main way to tell a search engine what your page is about. Metatags are HTML tags, and they are placed between the opening and closing <head> tags of html pages.

There are many metatags but there is no need to discuss them here because today the only important metatag is the <description> metatag, which is displayed under your URL in search results listings.

 

 

In the screenshot above the <description> metatag of Best Green Gadgets is the sentence which starts with ‘For all the tough talk ……. ‘and end with ‘…. eco-friendly technology.’ As you see, this sentence is displayed mot-a-mot when the site is shown in the search results. One of the keyword in the screenshot is s ‘Eco-Friendly.’

You can start applying the basic SEO techniques above to improve your webpage. This e-book does not have the purpose to cover SEO in depth but if you want to learn more about SEO, this tutorial is a good place to start at.

 

Search Engine Things To Avoid

If there are any search engine warnings you do not understand then there’s a high probability that these warnings are not for you, so don’t worry about it. However, you should know it in case someone with bad habits is trying to talk you into doing it. Not to mention learn from the many costly mistakes of others – save your money by making sure you…

 Do not just fill your page with lots of keywords that you don’t intend your visitors to see only to manipulate search engine. These deceptive activities, and others, will only get the search engine to ignore your site or even get it banned from indexing.

Avoid Webpage Duplication – do not create multiple copies of a page under different URLs – block duplicates print only version to make sure your page is included in the search results. Always remember you have two distinct audience, your human visitors, and the search engine crawlers

Check with the search engine (Google, Yahoo etc.) of your choice to know more about their rules and regulations.

Long descriptive Headlines are a No-No, make sure your headlines represent the brief summary of your page, if your website is about search engine optimization, make sure you include SEO in your headlines – be as descriptive as possible to help prevent unwanted clicks.

 

SEO Tips

Make sure your site has a clear hierarchy and text links – every page should be reachable from each other – use navigational bar or text link.

Make sure your site content is useful and filled with great information and tips.

Write pages that clearly describe your contents with relative keywords.

Make sure your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.

Make your pages for users, not for search engines – content rich site is better.

Link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or page rank will only hurt your site, keep away from sites that can get you penalized.

Submit your website to web directory submissions to increase your search engine optimization (SEO) and Page Rank (PR). Make sure part of choosing your search engine is the relevancy of the directory compared to your site. Google is a good search engine that has been known to please its audience with relevant information and helps to reward its business partners when they provide adequate and relative information.

Create blog, RSS, Newsletter, Press Releases to help improve your relationship with your customers and help to generate more contents and traffic for your site.

Be creative and helpful to other internet owners, by proving them with information they can download to help build their business – you can take this as part of your given back to the society, what you get in return is traffic and referrals.

Affiliate program is a great way to sell your product quickly by given commissions to your affiliate, you will not only make sales which you would not have made normally, but you will also get lots of people promoting you and generating traffic plus links to your site faster than you can imagine.

Social Bookmarking is a great way to get links to your site, and this we cover in detail in this book.

Another way to generate traffic to your site is through Adwords and Media Buys – this will cost you money.

Include your legal terms and conditions on your site to help your visitors understand their rights.