A Brief Introduction to the SEO Basics

In today's world, where internet has taken the role of the prime media, search engine optimization is the must-do for every website. Basically, SEO denotes the process to maximize the ranking of a particular web site. This tells its importance for itself. The higher a site will be in the search engine rankings, the more effective it will be for attracting the traffic which is really the lifeline for any website.

The importance of SEO services has naturally resulted in a lot of speculations. However, there are two types of SEO - on-page and off-page. The concept of on-page SEO is very fundamental and therefore very simple. It is the type of search engine optimization that takes place right on the web page.

On-page SEO:

This explains the name on-page. However, as an elemental aspect, it is absolutely necessary to have it on a website. Otherwise it will practically be non-existent in the search list. However, on-page SEO is the least effective means. There are different aspects of an on-page SEO. It focuses on keywords, contents, title and description. The purpose is of course to convince the search engine that the web page features the keywords as the main premise.

Off-page SEO:

Most of the success or failure, of an SEO depends on the off-page version, as its more difficult to be manipulated and search engines rely on those. As opposed to the on-page, this refers to the SEO methods performed beyond the web page. Most popularly, the place is the web-page of another website.

This is why the main factor of off-page SEO is to build links. These links in the other sites will make the search engine believe that that particular site is read and respected by those sites. This will naturally, further your rankings in the list of the search results. Of course, the links should be made carefully so that they correspond to the targeted keywords and each text anchor should contain something new in the text to have different varieties of those keywords.

The most effective trick

As far as, 'the most effective trick in SEO' is concerned, it is very frequently asked question. But to be realistic, there can not be any one trick.

SEO is not an event its a process. Thus it has to take care of the whole system and function in part. But such a system is rare to find. Many of the websites miss out some simple and obvious things. Many of them come up with excellent on and off page SEO, but they ignore the keyword research and lack in no. of visitors! Again, many other sites do not have the relevant content. Also, one can find the absence of backlinks, or even the quality of backlinks as the reason behind their failure to rank high in the search engine list.

However, organic SEO will concentrate on all the aspects. Like keyword research, content optimization, meta tag optimization, xhtml validation and in off-page, search engine submission, link building, press releases etc.

Selecting an SEO firm

For webmasters, the most difficult task is to get the right SEO company for them, especially for new webmasters on tight budget. One must not just think in cash-flow point of view, as the legitimate SEO services can cause a long term fortune for your website and on the other hand it can spoil your rankings rather than help!

In my opinion, an SEO company which provides the most ethical and white hat techniques should be selected rather than going for Brands. Furthermore, once search engine optimization is over you should generate a ranking report that will indicate your website's ranking in various popular search engines.

Dexter Boyle is an author of this article about SEO. Find more information on SEO Services here.

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SEO Primer - 7 Basics of SEO

This article is for the new web designer or business owner who wants to achieve a good placement for their web site in the search engines but doesn't know how. We are going to look at 7 Basics of SEO below. These aren't the only things you will want to know about SEO, but these are the areas you should learn about first. I have the topics listed in the order that you should approach them. Some topics will only take you a minute, some will take a little longer (cleaning up HTML code), and others will become an ongoing process (Keywords). But, after reading through this list you should have a good handle on where to start and where to proceed next.

SEO Basic 1. Let's start off with a definition. If you don't understand what SEO is then you will not be able to properly optimize your site. SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and is the process by which you Optimize (adjust) your web site so that it is positioned well in the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc). This is not the same thing as designing a site so that it attracts customers and entices them to buy. That is a completely different discussion.

SEO is what you do specifically on your site to improve your Search Engine Position. If you do a search on Google for any search term you will be presented with a list of links. At the top of the page and along the right side will be PPC (Pay-Per-Click) links where someone pays an amount per click to get positioned. Basically with PPC, the more you pay the better your position. Most people only glance at these listings. You don't need SEO to get one of these positions, just lots of money.

The main section of page contains the "natural" or "organic" listings. These links are listed in the order that Google has determined best fit your search query, with the best match listing first. There are only 10 listings per page and most people will only look at the 1st page, and maybe the 2nd. So your site needs to be listed within the top 10 and at the very worst within the top 20 to get any useful exposure. This is where SEO comes in. With SEO you will be adjusting your sites code so that the search engine will rank your site high up in the listings. This can be a daunting process as there may be tens of thousands of sites competing for the same top listing. One trick here is to aim your pages at less popular search terms to get higher placement. It is much better to be on the top of page one for a term that gets 1000 searches per month than to be on page three for a search term that gets millions of visits (almost no one looks at page three or beyond).

SEO Basic 2. Your web site has to be search engine friendly, so fix any bad code. The search engines send out "spiders" or "bots" that look over the whole internet, cataloging and categorizing web pages that they come across. If the search engine runs into trouble getting through your pages then it will either rank your page poorly, or worse skip your site all together. Making your site Search Engine Friendly means having the code easily accessible (no frames), not having mistakes in the code (check the code for errors), and guiding the search engine through your web site (good navigation).

So, try to steer away from complicated coding as much as possible. Things like Flash web sites look great, but they can cause search engine problems. Check your site for any coding errors, this is fairly easy to do with web design programs like Dreamweaver which will do this for you automatically. And, plan on having a text based navigation bar on every page. This is usually placed at the bottom of the pages. You may also want to consider having a "Site Map" page in your web site with easy to follow text based links to all of your important pages. Search Engines will look for a Site Map page and will use that to navigate a web site if available.

SEO Basic 3. By far the #1 Most Important Aspect of SEO is: Keywords. Keywords are the terms you type into a search engine to find interesting web sites to look at. You need to know what search terms people are likely to use to find your web site and then use those terms as your Keywords on your site. Start by making a list of all the keyword combinations you can think of that you would use to find your web site. Try them all on a search engine and see what you come up with.

You now need to see how these search terms perform on the web and what other possible search terms could be used for the same sites. There are several tools on the internet to help you with this research. A great free tool is available at Google:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google will let you type in a search term then give you a list of similar search terms, how often they were searched in the previous month and some advertiser comparison figures for Google Adwords. This allows you to quickly find additional keywords and to see how well they perform. As we mentioned in SEO Basic 1 a good idea is to optimize your site for a less frequently used keyword or keyword combination so that you can achieve a higher placement. The Google Keyword Tool will help you figure this out.

Look for only 1 or two keywords to focus on in any given page. Many times keywords will overlap, so you can focus on a longer keyword combination and cover many other keyword combinations at the same time. For instance if you are designing a page to sell Photoshop Training you can optimize for this keyword phrase "Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets" This will not only give you optimized performance for this keyword combination but also for these other keywords and combinations as well:

Adobe

Photoshop

Training

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop Training

Adobe Photoshop Training

Photoshop Training Video

Adobe Photoshop Training Video

Photoshop Training Video Sets

So try to come up with a multiple keyword combination that will contain several other keyword combinations as well.

Once you know what keywords you want to use you are ready to place those keywords on your page. The main places you want to use the keywords are:

In the title of the page (title meta tag)

In the description of the page (description meta tag)

In the first sentence on the page

In all of the image alt tags

In links to and from the page

Well represented in the body text of the page

The keyword meta tag is no longer looked at by the search engines, but I still put my keywords in that tag so that I have an easy reference for my own use when doing SEO.

Make sure you Pick the right keywords, and make sure they cover more than 5% of the word usage on the page. An easy way to get more keywords onto a page is by using lists such as:

We carry:

o Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Educators

o Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Students

o Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Business

o Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Hobbyists

Keep in mind that your page text should still be user friendly. If you use your keywords too frequently or in strange ways on your page, it may rank better in the search engines, but it will drive away visitors. Who wants to read a poorly written page?

SEO Basic 4. "Don't try anything funny". There are lots of "tricky" things you can do to cram more keywords into a page without annoying your visitors. The problem is that the search engines know about these tricks and will penalize your site if you use them. So don't do any of the following or you may find your web site disappear completely from the search engine listings.

White letters on white background, or any other similar text coloring trick. Even using a very light gray text on a white background, or very dark gray text on a black background can get you bumped from the search engines.

Don't repeat your keyword over and over again. People used to do things like this at the top or bottom of their pages: Photoshop Photoshop Photoshop Photoshop Photoshop. The worked in the early days of search engine optimization, but no longer. You should also not try this trick in alt tags, image names, links or other places in your code. The search engines will spot this and you will be penalized.

Don't put keywords into comment tags like this: . Also don't put keywords in hidden form fields like this: : . The search engines will spot these and mark you down accordingly. For the same reason don't create any hidden links as a place to hide keywords.

Even though putting keywords into image names and alt tags is a great idea, don't think that you can just create a bunch of clear gif images sized at 1x1 and fill those with keywords. The search engines are very good at spotting tricks like this as well.

So, use your keywords appropriately, don't try to sneak one past the search engines and you should do just fine. Just keep in mind, if you think that you need to hide the keywords to trick the search engine you can rest assured that they have already thought of that and will do their best to devalue your site accordingly if you use these "black hat" tricks.

SEO Basic 5. All pages should have links to other pages. The main search engines like links. They like outside sites linking into yours but they also like links within your site going to other pages. So in this case having more pages can be useful. Also since you now have all these pages that you are linking to it gives you a great place to use some more keywords. Make sure that your links include your keywords.

But, and this could have been in section 4 above, don't create "doorway pages" that redirect you to another page. It used to be common SEO practice to create lots (hundreds) of doorway pages, each one stuffed with specific keywords, all of which would redirect the visitor to the actual page they were looking for. This would give your site lots of pages, with lots of internal links and would allow you to tightly optimize these doorway pages for specific keywords, but . . .  the search engines have gotten wise to this trick and now penalize the use of redirect pages. So don't use redirects unless you absolutely need to. And never use doorway pages.

SEO Basic 6. Only try to optimize a page for one or two keyword groups. More than that just dilutes your keyword ratio. The search engines will analyze your web page to determine which words are used as keywords. They do this by looking at the title, the description, the page heading and the word use on the page. They will then determine how relevant your keywords are to your page. So if you try to use too many different keywords on a page it will only bring down the percentage of any individual keyword or group for that page. It is better to optimize for a larger keyword group as discussed above than to try to optimize a page for a lot of individual keywords that can't be easily used on one sentence. If you need to have a page optimized for several different, unrelated keywords you are better off creating several different pages and re-writing the body text on each page to match the keywords you are optimizing for. This will make each page relevant for the specific keyword and will get a better placement in the search engines.

SEO Basic 7. Be patient. Even with a perfectly optimized web site it can take several months for it to rise in the search engine standings. I usually recommend waiting at least 90 days and up to 6 months to see how well a web page is doing in the search engines. Also, even though you have gone to great lengths to target a specific keyword or keyword combination keep in mind that the search engines aren't required to agree with you. So when checking your standings look at several different search terms that you discovered in your research and see how well your page is placing. Hopefully you will find that your chosen keywords are getting your page listed the way you want, showing that your SEO has worked properly.

If you find that your page is ranking better for a different keyword, you should examine your page code to see why and make adjustments as needed. Maybe your page is placing higher for a keyword combination you weren't focusing on, but it is still a good combination for your goals. This gives you an ideal opportunity to go with that new combination to achieve even higher placing.

So, get started right now on your SEO. The longer you wait, the longer it will be before your web site is showing well up in the search engines.

In closing:

There is a lot more to SEO than just these 7 quick points, but this will get you started on the right path. Go through these steps and your web pages will be well positioned for any other SEO you may want to perform on your site in the future.

George Peirson is a successful Entrepreneur and Internet Trainer. He is the author of over 40 multimedia based tutorial training titles and several design articles. To get his Free e-Book "Web Design Tips" visit http://www.howtogurus.com

Article copyright 2008 George Peirson

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Basics of SEO Optimization Redefined With Organic SEO Analysis Tips

The major target of SEO is to enhance your website keywords into the highest position into all kinds of search engines. This includes several kinds of work done but firstly we have to understand the basics of ethical organic SEO and the requirement of SEO in all kinds of small business.

Why SEO is needed of all small business owners?

SEO is nothing but a quality methodology which increases a site reputation into the various search engines through the keywords of that site. Nowadays every small business should acquire SEO services to highlight their site into the search engines.

An ethical SEO analyst gives your business the superb edge from your competitors over enormous competition by getting top placements in a steady manner. The end results are drastic reductions of cost over traditional media advertising process due to:

1. Rising local business to the global arena with tiny expenditure.

2. An effective online promotion campaign with increased brand promotion.

3. Advertise your site globally at your required business market.

4. Logical and sensible keywords to receive vast unique visitors.

5. Receive wise promotion strategies for each of your keywords.

6. Get superb SERP (Search Engine Resulting Position) within a short time.

7. Tremendously receiving thousands of qualified traffic to your site.

8. No need to carry the extra headache for SEO apart from your business.

9. No needs to employ more peoples for get ranked into search engines.

Ethical organic white hat SEO stands for:

Recently through a global survey it is found that giant SEO companies have a common format or we can say a common working template for promoting their all clients. They don't have much time to separate the unique requirements of their clients. Here comes the term professional ethics.

An ethical white hat SEO analyst always tries to feel the heart beat of their client sites. They can realize those logistic SEO needs of those sites thus they not only separating the online promotional strategies but also treat those sites as their own. Only for this reason it is observed that these kinds of site get ranked in a quick manner into the search engines and hold these ranks for a long time.

Advantages of appointing an ethical SEO analyst

Hiring a growing ethical SEO analyst or services for your small business website is the finest thought to do if your wish to pull ahead your keywords amongst from your competitors. Here are some few accurate benefits of receiving the services from a growing ethical SEO firm.

1. Specialized SEO experts have the huge depth knowledge on different methods to improve the ranking of your keywords in all search engines.

2. As they are researching on the web in a regular manner they can produce superb ranking through an ethical ground in a speedy style.

3. Ethical SEO analysts can separate the requirements of various clients and process the work flow according to them.

4. SEO specialists will give you superior informative advice on effectual online promotion and off-page marketing methodologies.

5. It helps your website to create a superior sum of web traffic at your site which increases the sales of your business product and services.

Joanna Gadel has a deep involvement in SEO analysis [http://www.seosydney.net.au/whyseo.html] and working for SEO Sydney, a reputed Australian search engine marketing company and helps her audience through her informative articles regarding SEO and SEM.

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A Business Owner's Guide to SEO Basics

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the term used to describe the process of driving a website to be more popular on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. When people search phrases or words in a search engine (also known as keywords), the results and the order that they appear in is the direct effect of SEO.

Do you need SEO?

Generally most businesses would answer this question with a resounding yes, however how much you choose to invest into SEO is dependent upon how you want to do business. A lot of business that you generate most likely derives from word of mouth referrals, however, studies from Forrester Research shows that 93% of consumers worldwide use search engines to find and access websites.

Consumers are significantly more likely to initiate contact and purchase a product or service from a business that they can find online. If your site can't be easily located online, then your business is missing out on substantial prospective business.

How does SEO work?

There are a lot of factors concerning SEO. The keywords you choose and the popularity of the search for them and the competition that you have with those keywords are just the beginning. The titles, descriptions, url names, html framework/validity, tags and how they are used are also crucial factors. Backlinks to your site and popularity are also factors. There are hundreds factors and penalties that search engines use in order to deploy SEO. SEO could easily be likened to chemistry. Which brings me to my next point:

Should you hire someone for SEO?

Absolutely. It is possible for anyone to learn, but let's be honest, you have a business to run. SEO takes a lot of time to learn, employ, and maintain. For most business owners to become expert SEO analysts is unreasonable, but you should be armed with the knowledge of what you need to be more successful from SEO, and what to expect from anyone you employ to do it.

In order to have an effective SEO campaign, I would strongly urge anyone to employ an SEO professional. Fortunately, a lot of web design firms specialize in SEO, has someone on staff that does, or can refer you to someone. If your designer does not - there are plenty on the market.

What should you watch for when shopping for an SEO specialist?

Be extremely cautious of anyone who promises you the top spot on Google or immediate results. As good as that sounds, it really is too good to be true.

Effective SEO is slow and steady which equates to months and months of work. It is important to note that the months and months of work are in bits and pieces and not 40-hour work weeks. There are no fast tracks to SEO success and make no mistake about it, search engines are not easily fooled. There are penalties for what has been coined as "Black Hat" SEO techniques. Here are just a few Black Hat SEO techniques:

Keyword stuffing (packing long lists of keywords on your site)
Invisible text (this is done by placing text in your html that does not show up on your website when viewed)
Doorway pages (pages that are added to your website, but never seen)
Tiny text or alt text (placing very small text on your page for spamming keywords)
Mirror sites (sites that is a duplicate of your site)
Submitting your site repeatedly to search engines (which is seen as spamming)Using any of the above tactics will not only get your site penalized in search rankings, it will more than likely get your site banned from search engines altogether.

Back links (links on other websites that link to yours) are important to SEO, and getting bad ones or spam links, are not good for SEO. Beware of companies/individuals who use this technique as well. When consulting with an SEO professional, ask them to provide you with a "plan of action" or how they intend to help your SEO. If you see any of the above Black Hat techniques, keep shopping.

Those techniques will work, for about 5 minutes until the search engines figure it out, and they usually do, and then it's ban city. You'll have to undo the Black Hat techniques, reformat, resubmit your site, and hopefully they will accept your site again. You are back to square one and have to now employ a legitimate SEO specialist.

How long does SEO take?

A long time. I like instant gratification as much as the next person, but SEO is where patience really pays off. Once your site is submitted to a search engine it usually can take 1-3 weeks to get indexed, but that's not a promise. After that, it's time to start tweaking the SEO process. Search engines do not update as much as we would like them to, popular keywords today may not be popular next week, if you rank high today - that spot isn't guaranteed forever, or even for tomorrow for that matter, ranks fluctuate, and trends change.

With that said, SEO is not a one time event, it is an ongoing process. There are likely thousands of websites who want your spot and if you give up on maintaining SEO efforts, you will lose it, usually pretty fast. A lot of SEO and/or web design companies have packages or hourly rates for SEO and you can choose how much you want to invest in any given month or timeframe.

Now that you have a better understanding of what SEO is, how it works, and it's importance to your business, you are well on your way to making smart business decisions concerning your website and it's marketing.

Marybeth Shanafelt |
Business Owner | Consultant | Designer |
http://leftclickstudios.com

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