Basic Webmaster SEO Tips

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that you definitively should implement if you want to drive free traffic to your website. In short, SEO is what you need to do in order for the search engines to give your websites the proper placement and desired ranking whenever someone searches for a keyword, or key phrase, related to the topic of your website. SEO is partly science and partly art and it is not based on common sense or logic. Only those who really know what they are doing manage to set up the right wording and sprinkled the correct keywords throughout their web pages in a manner that really fullfill the potential of their websites. With possible millions of competing websites, it can be very difficult keeping up with your competitors. In this short article I will try to describe a few things you can do to optimize your websites for the search engines.

Firstly, there are many different search engines that people use to find information on the net. Actually, there are several hundreds of them. Yes, maybe even thousands. However there are only three or so worth mentioning in this regard and the top three that you should be trying to optimize your site for are Google, Yahoo and MSN, in that particular order. Since we all want to be at the top of the Google listings, it could sometimes be a good idea to start with MSN and Yahoo as they simply are quicker to index your site and there is usually less competition on those search engines. You will still get a significant amount of traffic to your website from these search engines if you manage to get a top ranking. Google is the king of traffic, but there is almost always more competition there.

Next, one of the biggest mistakes people tend to do is to try to optimize their websites for keywords that a lot of people are searches for. How is that stupid? Easy. There will always be a lot more competition for high traffic keywords! Choosing the right keywords and keyword phrases to beat out the competition can be really hard and often a lot of ongoing tweaking and changing is necessary to achieve the desired ranking. One way to find the best keywords is to use a keyword research tool that displays the number of times per month your chosen keyword is searched in the three major search engines and also to find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for. You may initially think that the more a term is searched, the more traffic you will get, but think again! As mentioned above the more a term is searched, the harder it will be to get your site ranked at the top of the search results, or even within the first PAGES of search results. The best is to choose terms that are less popular but still have a significant number of searches each and every month. A good number to aim for is any term that is searched about 5000-10000 times per month but sometimes it may even be a good idea to aim much lower. It can often be a good idea to start with a keyword that get maybe only a few hundred searches a month, get some clicks and then start moving up the ladder. It's rather hard to do this without using a helpful keyword research tool such as the free Good Keywords or the more advanced SEO Elite.

Once the good keywords are found you want to go into the source code of your website and add those keywords to your HTML code in the right places such as Meta Description, Meta Tags etc. You also need to put your keywords in the title tag, the main keyword in <H1> and preferably also one or two secondary keywords in <H2> header tags, and then sprinkled the rest of the less important keywords throughout the text on your pages. Keyword density is an important factor that the search engines take into consideration when listing pages in the search results. Just be aware of that the more keywords you try to optimize your website for the poorer you will rank for your main keywords as they will loose their power. You should repeat, underline, make bold or give bigger fonts to your keywords throughout the text, but be careful not to overload your pages with the same keywords too many times. You simply don’t want to make it obvious that you are just trying to get better search engine rankings. If you are not careful about this, you may risk being banned by the search engines.

After you have carefully sprinkled your site with enough good keywords you should write articles on topics related to your keywords and add them to your web site. Without overloading the articles with your keywords, use the selected keywords or key phrases in the article title, the first paragraph of your text , within the body of the text and in the conclusion of your new article. Why do this? Simply because search engines really loves content. Try to do this on an ongoing basis and add at least a few new articles a week and you will be off to a very good start! Free traffic from the search engines is the best way to get traffic to your website and I hope the tips above can help you understand the basics of keyword optimization and SEO!