SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, plays an important role in advertising a website. This is how you get a higher listing in the search results, when keywords that are relevant to your website are searched for. The more optimized your site is, the higher it will be in the search engine results.
This brings what is known as natural search traffic to your website. Natural search traffic means that someone found your site in the search engine results because it was naturally listed high enough for them to find it. You didn’t pay to get it listed higher.
There are two types of SEO: on site and offsite. Off site is the easiest to explain, and all it entails is getting inbound links to your site. This means that you get a link to your site listed on other people’s websites.
However, they must be quality links for the search engines to pay any attention to them. You want to get your link on sites that are important. The search engine considers sites that have a high Google page rank, and a low Alexa rank important.
The more quality inbound links you get, the more important your own site becomes, as far as the search engines are concerned. Above all, do not use link farms, and avoid reciprocal linking. You can get your link on sites by participating in the forums with a signature file, or by commenting on blogs and such.
Another way to get more links is to participate in a 3 Way Link Exchange, meaning you are linking to a site that links to another site that in turn links back to you. I have found a service called 3waylinks.net that dramatically increased the page rank of my site MakeMoney-1.com. The monthly fee allows you to add 50(!) sites to the network. Make sure to read all the testimonials - Awesome!
Here’s the link:http://www.3waylinks.net
When you are getting links on other sites, mix it up. Don’t just link to your main page all the time. Search engines become more interested when they see multiple sites linking to various pages on your site, instead of just the main one. Build inbound links slowly. Search engines become suspicious when you get too many inbound links too fast!
There are numerous elements of on site SEO. First, you want very clean HTML code. Search engines don’t like messy code that contains numerous errors. Use an HTML code validator to check your code. Make sure to put javascript and style sheet code in separate include files.
Make sure that you use your keywords appropriately. First, you should have a keyword density of 2 to 3%. If there are 1200 words on the page, your keyword should appear 24 to 36 times in that content.
Use your keywords in all ‘alt’ tags. There are alt tags for images, tables, and links. Also use your keywords in the ‘title’ tag which is in the ‘head’ tag at the top of the code. Search engines love links. Remember this. Do some internal linking in your content, using text links.
When linking, avoid linking words like ‘here’ or ‘click here.’ This does nothing for SEO. Instead, for example if your keyword was weight loss, you might have a link that says ‘weight loss information for women over 40.’ Make sure that you put your keywords in bold letters, and use the H1 or H2 tags for your titles and subtitles, which should also contain your keywords.
Build a site map, upload it to your server, and link to it on all of your pages. Search engines love site maps. In fact, Google makes it easy to create a free site map that you can use for your site.
Do not use any hidden text. Do not spam your keywords. Use them in natural ways. Write natural sentences. Search engines are very hard to fool, and if you use ‘black hat’ SEO techniques, the search engine spiders will simply stop visiting, and your site won’t get listed!
Finally, do not use any content on your site that can be found elsewhere. All of your content must be original, or the search engine will view it as duplicate content, and ignore it.