Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is basically the process of optimizing your site to obtain high rankings in the search engines for your chosen keywords. When deciding where to place you in their results page for a specific keyword, search engines look at onpage factors and offpage factors. I'll discuss the basics of SEO below, but if you want the definitive search engine optimisation ebook, which I think is the best free ebook I've ever come across, and one which I have learnt so much from, then please visit the home page, and enter your name and email address into the form provided.

Let's start with the onpage factors. These are things you can alter on your webpages to fully optimise your site in order to please the search engines:

- Title - This appears in the blue box at the very top of the page, and should include your main keyword(s) and be as short as possible to give them more weight. 

- Header Tags - You should make a point of including these tags, and again include your main keyword(s) within them, particularly the H1 tag which is usually simply the title of your content. Other keywords should appear in sub-headings, which are your H2 tags. You should also bold and underline these titles containing your keywords.

- Keyword Density - You should include your main keyword(s) as often as possible without making the content seem spammy or nonsensical. Opinion is divided as to what the optimum percentage is regarding how often your main keyword should appear in your content. In the past a webpage with the main keyword making up anywhere between 5% and 15% of the content was considered to a well-optimised page. However I've been reading recently that Google and other search engines are starting to favour sites with less than 5%.

- Meta Tags / Descriptions - You should use meta tags to write a description of your webpage's content. This will not appear on the actual webpage, but in the description in the search engine results. It should be compelling so visitors click on the link to your site, as well as including your main keyword(s) for optimisation purposes.

- Image Tags - If you have any graphics on your site, then you should include your main keyword(s) in the alt tag of each image.

Now let's move onto offpage optimisation, which is even more important, in terms of obtaining high rankings, than onpage optimization. This can basically be summed up in one word, LINKS. You can think of each link as a vote or recommendation for your site, and the more you have the higher you will rank.

Google, and most other search engines, place great emphasis on both the quality and quantity of inward links to your site. In general terms you want to get as many as possible, but you should place more emphasis on getting quality links from sites similar in subject to your own, and from pages with high page rank (PR). The PR of a site can be viewed by downloading the Google toolbar, and is a measure of the number and quality of links pointing to a site, between 1 and 10, with 10 being the best.

I discussed all the different ways of getting links to your site in other sections. These include articles, blogs, directories, forums, traffic exchanges, and so on, but you should also actively exchange links with other sites.

There are many ways you can do this. You can simply find popular sites in the same niche as yours, find a contact form or address and write a polite email saying how much you like their site, and ask them if they would link to your site in return for you linking to their site. Make sure you add their site to your links page before you contact them, and give them the URL where their link is located. 

You can also go to and join various sites who have a whole directory of sites who are all actively seeking reciprocal links. The two most popular ones are Link Metro and Link Market. Both offer free options, and are a great way of building up a good number of links to your site in a relatively short space of time. However, you should remember that search engines place more importance on one-way links than two-way or reciprocal links, so don't forget to keep writing articles and submitting to directories for those valuable one-way links.

Ultimately, the key to good search engine optimization, and obtaining those precious high rankings is to analyze your competition for your main keyword(s) and basically copy their optimization methods, but go that little bit further to outrank them. Now you can do this manually but this is really time consuming. There is an excellent piece of software that I use on all my sites to obtain high rankings and that's SEO Elite. 

SEO Elite will allow you to basically analyze your competition for any keyword, and will tell you things like what sites link to them, their respective PR, how valuable each link is in terms of SEO, contact address of link partner and much more. This will enable you to contact these good link partners yourself and get them to link to your site as well.

The software will also allow you to find link partners for any keyword of your choice, as well as checking that all your current link partners are still linking back to you. It will also tell you where you rank in the major search engines for any given keyword.

There are so many invaluable features included in the software, that I couldn't now imagine trying to optimize a site without it. It really is an incredibly powerful piece of software. Please take a few minutes to visit the site by clicking here, and don't forget to go to the home page of this site and enter your name and email address to get your hands on a 90-page ebook, that will tell you everything you could possibly need to know about search engine optimization and obtaining those high rankings.

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