What Is SEO
Earlier we talked a lot about how to get the right keywords or keyword research, now let’s talk about how we go about ranking for those keywords in the big search engines (google, yahoo and msn/bing).
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the topic:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Allow me to translate 
You want to create your webpages in a way that will allow them to show up on the first page of “Google” for example when someone searches for a particular keyword or keyphrase. SEO or search engine optimization is a broard term for all the little things we do to accomplish that.
There are quite a few different factors that determine where you rank for your keyword. Let’s divide them up into onpage and offpage factors.
Onpage factors are things on your own webpage and that you have direct control over. Please not that we are optimizing each individual page not just the site as a whole. Let’s look at some of the most important on page factors:
Title
The title of your page is the most important factor when it comes to ranking. Choose a title that includes your main keyword or keyphrase. Use it early in the title, but also make it title appealing and interesting since it’s the first thing the reader will see when they look at search results. For the same reason you also want to include a good description. Let’s look at a search result to illustrate.
My keywords (in this case keywords and keyphrases) are in the title and it sounds pretty interesting (at least I think so). The description is the littel bit of text below it, which in this case isn’t perfect since it repeats the title and then has some infor on when it was posted, both of which don’t really help the reader. It would have been better if the description would have been “One of the best skills you can learn when you are starting your affiliate and article marketing career is how to do keyword research. Today I’ll share how I go about doing just that.”
My homework for this coming week is going to look for a plugin that will help me craft better descriptions.
Content
This one is pretty straight forward. You want your keywords and keyphrases in the content of your page. Whenever possible I try to use main main keyword somewhere in the first 100 words of my blog posts and articles. After that just sort of naturally sprinkle it in there. You can also use them in your H tags (H1, H2 etc), in bolded or italizied text (which gives them a little bit more weight than just plain normal text) and even as the alt text of your images.
A Word Of Caution – don’t overdo this. It’s known as keyword stuffing and can actually hurt you. Just use the keywords naturally in your content.
Internal Links
These are the links within your website. For example, when your main article page links to an individual article, that link is an internal link. Internal links are important. It is through links that the search engines make their way through your website. Always make sure that you are linking from somewhere on your website to each piece of new content you create on it. That’s why I like to use a wordpress blog – it automates that part for me.
The anchor text is also important. It’s the text you use to link to the page in question. Here’s an example:
Picking keywords and keyphrases
The link above links to the article right here on this blog about choosing keywords and keyphrases (the same one we talked about in the graphic above). The anchor text in this case is “picking keywords and keyphrases”. Note how I worked both of my keywords into the anchor text.
Technically this last point could be counted as an offpage factor since it isn’t on the actual page but a different page of the same website. I kinda think of it more as an onpage or a better term would be onsite factor that I have direct control over.
Now let’s move on to offpage factors. The main offpage or offsite factor to consider is external links. Let’s take a look.
External Links
External links are links from other pages that point to your website and they are a major factor in search engine optimization. After you’ve gotten all your on page factors in order, this is were you will spend all your time and focus on.
A very simplified view of a search engine looks like this. The search engine looks at your page and uses the onpage factors to determine what your page is about. The more of them you have in place, the more relevant you are on that particular topic. Then it looks at all the other websites / pages that link to your page. Again it is important to note that this applies to the individual pages of your website not your entire website. The more links you get to your website, the more “votes” you get… in essence, the web is a democracy and the more “votes” you get the higher your site will rank.
Of course it isn’t quite that simple. Anchor text again plays a role and not all votes are created equal (stronger websites who are on topic, get more powerful votes). Let’s get back to anchor test for a minute here. Ideally you want your keywords in the anchor text, but you also don’t want the extact same anchor text in every link, a little variety is good. When you have a little bit of control over the incoming links from other webpages (for example when you are submitting an article to an article directory), keep those two things in mind.
That’s about it. I’ll work on another post about how we will go about getting those external links shortly. For now, get your onpage stuff in order and then write and submit an article or two for your webpages / posts and get those submitted to places like ezinearticle.com
You may also like to read:
- Anchor Text Link Explained
- Leave A Comment Gain A Keyword Rich Link
- SEO Management Tool – Track Your Progress With SEO Elite
- Writing SEO Descriptions For Higher Click-Throughs
- SEO In A Nutshell
Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, what is search engine optimization, what is seo
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