Introduction to SEO

Introduction to SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of making your website, or certain pages within your website, rank highly in Google or the other search engines for particular keywords.

It is a common misconception that SEO is some kind of 'black art', that only a few people have figured out and which you have to pay through the ear to have done well. This is 100% false.

While there are some very talented SEO gurus out there who have some particular tricks and tips on how to do things, the basics of good SEO are pretty much universal.

A quick note on the SEO related products out there though - while there are some brilliant SEO tools and resources available, there are also a lot of scammers who just want your money. So here's a good rule of thumb - if they "guarantee" front page Google rankings with minimal effort, keep your money. There's no such thing as a guarantee in this business. SEO takes time and hard work. Sure there are short cuts and some paid tools will help you take them, but if someone is professing to know some 'secret' or blackhat (read: unethical) technique that will get results within days, forget it.

There are two main aspects to SEO: on-page, which has to do with your actual content on the web page in question, and off-page, which is about inbound links and how visible your content is.

This lesson will just give you a brief overview of both.

On page SEO

On page SEO is basically the little tweaks you make to a webpage to make it more attractive to a search engine.

Here is a general list of on-page SEO factors and what you should do with each.

H1 Tag - this is like the newspaper headline of your page or article. It's a good idea to have the keyword you're trying to target in here.

Title Tag - the title tag is the title of the page itself, and can be the same as the H1 tag if you want. Title tags are also the text that show up in the search engine results, so it's a good idea to make them relevant and inviting; you want to the title to say "click me, I'm interesting" (for those who might take things a bit too literally - please don't actually put "click me, I'm interesting" in your title tags!)

Meta-keywords - Meta keywords are a list of keywords that you can put in your header that are supposed to tell the search engines what your page is about. Trouble is, a lot of marketers and spammers ended up chucking hundreds of irrelevant keywords in the tag to try and rank for everything. Because of that, search engines pretty much ignore meta-keywords now days. But if you're covering all your bases, put your relevant keywords in there as well; just make sure they appear somewhere on the page or in the article too!

Meta-description - The meta description has been abused in much the same way as the meta-keywords tag. However, the meta description is still useful, as it is often the text that the search engines display underneath the title of your result. It's a good idea to have your keyword in here too - but remember, people will read this, so you want it to read like a gentle advertisement for your website, that will tell people what they're going to be reading about on this page.

Image Alt tags - Image Alt tags were intended to provide an alternate text if the person browsing had images turned off, or if they were using a screen reader, e.g. blind users. However it is another place where people have spammed with keywords, so the search engines don't pay a huge amount of attention to anymore., It's a good idea, however, to have good image tags as these will help with the overall relevance of your page, and also might help you rank highly for image search if that's something you're trying to do.

Image File Names - this is a pretty easy one. Instead of calling the image "picture1.jpg", call it something relevant - like "eBay_product_sourcing.jpg" (assuming your image or article has something to do with eBay product sourcing.)

Website Folder Names - this can be a way of getting your keywords into your URL, and also keeping things organized on your website. For example, say you have an article called "The five biggest mistakes sellers make on eBay", you could put it here:

www.yoursite.com/five-biggest-mistakes

Instead, you could organize it like this

www.yoursite.com/ebay-selling/five-biggest-mistakes

That way, you can also put all your other eBay related articles under the same folder.

Content - the most important thing to keep in mind when writing the content for your site is, "user first, search engine second". It's really hard to write if you're trying to pack in keywords at the same time. And it doesn't provide a very good user experience either. Remember, your articles and other pages need to be interesting to people as it's people, not search engines that will be buying through your affiliate link!

The best idea is usually to write an article first, and then go back over it a sprinkle a few keywords in relevant places - most people find this much easier than trying to write with the keywords in mind.

When you go through and do this, you want to have about a 1% keyword ratio - which means the keyword appears every 100 words or so - but this is a guide, not a stead fast rule. There are a lot of tools out there that will calculate your keyword density: Traffic Travis is one of them.

Internal Links - when you link to a page, the text that you are linking from is called the anchor text. For example if I were to link to the SaleHoo homepage, the anchor text for this link is "SaleHoo homepage". While this is usually considered an off page factor, it is important to do it correctly within your site as well. Many people make the mistake of linking to their homepage through with the anchor text "Home" - but what you're really doing here is optimizing for the keyword "Home" instead of your site's keyword. A better idea would be to use the site's name - for example if you're site is called "Wholesale Sourcing Power Secrets" - then you would make that your link, or "Wholesale Sourcing Power Secrets Home".

Off Page SEO

Off page SEO is the stuff you do to help your webpage rank in the search engines. To understand this you need to understand just a little bit about how the search engines actually find your webpages.

Search engines use specially designed programs called robots or spiders that wander around the web, following all the links that they find. This helps the search engine compile a massive list or index of websites. But in addition, the links to a website or webpage helps the search engines decide the quality of the content. The assumption is, if the content is good, lots of people will link to it.

That's why you'll often hear SEOs talk about link-building. Link building is the process of getting inbound links. There are a number of ways of doing this, but here are a few examples.

• Create link-worthy content - yet another reason to try to write good content. If you write stuff that is interesting, humorous, or controversial, you will probably find you naturally attract links. This is called link-bait - content that just begs for other people to link to it!
• Directories - There are tons of free and paid link directories on the web that let you list your site in a relevant category. Many directories have criteria for submission and manually check each one, so make sure your site meets their standards and is relevant to the directory category.
• One way links - This is possibly the most laborious link building process, although it can be very effective, particularly if you have good content. Basically, it involves approaching other relevant websites and asking them to link to you. Many sites have a 'resources' or 'links' section that you can submit a link to. Some webmasters may ask for a reciprocal link, where you link back to them. This can work, but it is not as good as having one way links from a whole bunch of websites.
• Writing Articles - There are tons of free articles site that you can write for like ezinearticles. Write on a topic relevant to your website, and add a link to the bottom of the article. For many affiliates this is a preferred way of getting backlinks.
• Squidoo and Hubpages - Squidoo and Hubpages allows you to write a one page article or 'lens' on a certain topic, and link out to other resources. This is a bit more involved than writing a short article on Ezinearticles, but you also have more room for creativity, as Squidoo and Hubpages allow you to add video and images to your pages. Be aware that these sites frequently change their rules. Squidoo recently imposed restrictions on the types of topics you could create a "lens" on... so check before you invest your time in building one!
• Guest Blogging - approach other relevant websites and blogs and offer to write a guest blog post for them. They get new and interesting content for their readers - you get a link back from the post!

More SEO information:

SaleHoo recommends the following resources for SEO advice:

• Affilorama
• SEOmoz