Basic SEO Techniques

The world of SEO is full of terms and complicated strategies that few webmasters seem willing to discuss. Before you become an SEO master, you have to start out as an apprentice with simple and basic strategies. This will help people find your page, and either clicks your ads or buy your products, which means a higher profit from your website.

Let’s start with your website’s coding. Open the HTML of your website and look at the “title” tag near the top. This refers to the title that appears at the top of the browser window.

When search engines crawl your website, they do more than just crawl your content, they crawl your coding as well. By having a keyword enriched title, or a title that includes a keyword and a natural search term (such as “What is [blah]” or “How to [blah]”), you will already be ahead of the game. If you don’t include a title, or have a clunky and nondescript title, search engine will have a harder time placing you.

Under the title, we need a “meta description.” Meta data does not appear on your website, but it does appear to spiders. The meta description is a more elaborate version of the title, and describes what the website is about. This is commonly the description that appears on a search engine.

Next, “meta keywords.” Unlike most parts of your website, where keyword stuffing is a bad idea, the meta keywords is where you type in every keyword you can think of that describes your website.

Now that the coding is out of the way, let’s talk about the content itself.

Every page or article on your website should start with a header tag and a title. Like the website title, this one should be a natural search term with a keyword. Commonly, the header and title are the same exact phrase.

The body of your content should contain your targeted keyword, but not too many times. If you use a keyword too much, you actually work against your SEO efforts. Search engines will say your website is spam, and may sandbox you.

So, how much keywords should you use?

Each article should be targeted for one, two keywords at most. Write that keyword two to three times in the first paragraph, then one time every other paragraph. If you have a short article (200 to 300 words) then place the keyword in the first paragraph and very sparingly in the body.

After keywords comes linking. Links will attract search engines and people to your website. Just go to any social networking, forum, social bookmarking or article directory and add a link to your page.

The more links you have (especially from high page rank, dofollow websites) the better your website will look.

While these techniques are basic, this will help your website rank much higher in search engines. Try it out, and you should see the results dramatically.