Introduction – What Is SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to one's site, SEO is not advertising. Of course, you can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay.

SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines – for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.

How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you need to learn about SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is not impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified. Sometimes crawlers will not visit your site for a month or two, so during this time your SEO efforts will not be rewarded. But there is nothing you can do about it, so just keep quiet.

What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one pages (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.

The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

Differences between the Major Search Engines

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Yahoo! are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter of fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and MSN, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Process

Search engine optimization (SEO) process main objective and goal is:

· Search engine friendly web site

· Top Ranking in major search engines

· Enhance the popularity of the web site

· Increase the traffic and the number of visitors

· Gain more global customer base

· Maximize return of investment (ROI)

Search engine optimization is a continuous, ongoing process or strategy and involves following steps:

1. Preliminary Site Analysis
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Keyword Research
4. Search Engine Friendly Design Suggestions
5. On Page Optimization

· Meta Tag Optimization

· Content Optimization

· Image and Anchor Tag Optimization

· Bold, Italic Tag Optimization

6. Off Page Optimization

· Directory Submission

· Quality Link Building

· Search Engine Submission

7. Social Media Optimization

· RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

· Blogs

· News Articles and Promotion

· Content Swapping

· Social Book Marking

· Social Network Promotion

8. SEO Content Writing

Each Step in SEO Process has it own importance and should be implemented in effective and professional manner to gain the main objective and goal of Search engine optimization (SEO) process.

There are two categories of criteria that search engines use to rank pages:

• On Page Factors - Analysis of the HTML source code for a page
• Off Page Factors - Analysis of inbound links and the pages they link from

Each search engine weights factors differently, but the fact remains that they all have a limited criteria to choose from. By optimizing your site for one search engine, you have to a large degree optimize it for all of them.

The following SEO tutorial subscribes to the 80/20 rule (yielding 80% of the possible results with just 20% of the possible effort). The basic SEO process can be summarized with the following outline:

• Keyword/Keyphrase Research
• Competitor Analysis
• On Page Optimizations
• Title Tag
• Meta (Description) Tag
• Copy
• Actual Text - use your keywords / keyphrases
• Alt Tags
• 'H' Tags
• Bold, Italics
• Off Page Optimizations - Link Building

I) Keyword/Keyphrase Research

Keywords are the most important SEO item for every search engine – actually they are what search strings are matched against. So you see that it is very important that you optimize your site for the right keywords. This seems easy at first but when you get into more detail, it might be a bit confusing to correctly determine the keywords. But with a little research and thinking the problem of selecting the right keywords to optimize for can be solved.

When you have a good list of keywords, you can use several on-line tools to search for related possibilities:

• Google AdWords' Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool
• WordTracker
• Webmaster Toolkit's Keyword Research Tool
• Espotting's Keyword Generator
• Ask Jeeves Related Search Suggestions

1. Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize For

It seems that the time when you could easily top the results for a one-word search string is centuries ago. Now, when the Web is so densely populated with sites, it is next to impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search string. Achieving constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings is a more realistic goal. If you examine closely the dynamics of search results for popular one-word keywords, you might notice that it is so easy one week to be in the first ten results and the next one– to have fallen out of the first 30 results because the competition for popular one-word keywords is so fierce and other sites have replaced you.

Of course, you can include one-word strings in your keywords list but if they are not backed up by more expressions, do not dream of high ratings. For instance, if you have a site about dogs, “dog” is a mandatory keyword but if you do not optimize for more words, like “dog owners”, “dog breeds”, “dog food”, or even “canine”, success is unlikely, especially for such a popular keyword. The examples given here are by no means the ultimate truth about how to optimize a dog site but they are good enough to show that you need to think broad when choosing the keywords.

Generally, when you start optimization, the first thing you need to consider is the keywords that describe the content of your site best and that are most likely to be used by users to find you. Ideally, you know your users well and can guess correctly what search strings they are likely to use to search for you. One issue to consider is synonyms. Very often users will use a different word for the same thing. For instance, in the example with the dog site, “canine” is a synonym and it is for sure that there will be users who will use it, so it does not hurt to include it now and then on your pages. But do not rush to optimize for every synonym you can think of – search engines themselves have algorithms that include synonyms in the keyword match, especially for languages like English.

Instead, think of more keywords that are likely to be used to describe your site. Thinking thematically is especially good because search engines tend to rate a page higher if it belongs to a site the theme of which fits into the keyword string. In this aspect it is important that your site is concentrated around a particular theme – i.e. dogs. It might be difficult to think of all the relevant keywords on your own but that is why tools are for. For instance, the Website Keyword Suggestions Tool below can help you to see how search engines determine the theme of your web site and what keywords fit into this theme. You can also try Google's Keyword Tool to get more suggestions about which keywords are hot and which are not.

When choosing the keywords to optimize for, you need to consider not only their relevancy to your site and the expected monthly number of searches for these particular keywords. Very often narrow searches are more valuable because the users that come to your site are those that are really interested in your product. If we go on with the dog example, you might discover that the “adopt a dog” keyphrase brings you more visitors because you have a special section on your site where you give advice on what to look for when adopting a dog. This page is not of interest of current dog owners but to potential dog owners only, who might be not so many in number but are your target audience and the overall effect of attracting this niche can be better than attracting everybody who is interested in dogs in general. So, when you look at the numbers of search hits per month, consider the unique hits that fit into the theme of your site.

2. Keyword Density

After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try the Keyword Density Checker below to determine the keyword density of your website.

Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords – 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.

3. Keywords in Special Places

Keywords are very important not only as quantity but as quality as well – i.e. if you have more keywords in the page title, the headings, the first paragraphs – this counts more than if you have many keywords at the bottom of the page. The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the page title, the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the page and therefore, all equal, if you have the same keyword density as your competitors but you have keywords in the URL, this will boost your ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo!.

a. Keywords in URLs and File Names

The domain name and the whole URL of a site tell a lot about it. The presumption is that if your site is about dogs, you will have “dog”, “dogs”, or “puppy” as part of your domain name. For instance, if your site is mainly about adopting dogs, it is much better to name your dog site “dog-adopt.net” than “animal-care.org”, for example, because in the first case you have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword.

When hunting for keyword rich domain names, don't get greedy. While from a SEO point of view it is better to have 5 keywords in the URL, just imagine how long and difficult to memorize the URL will be. So you need to strike a balance between the keywords in the URL and site usability, which says that more than 3 words in the URL is a way too much.
Probably you will not be able to come on your own with tons of good suggestions. Additionally, even if you manage to think of a couple of good domain names, they might be already taken. In such cases tools like the Tool below can come very handy.

File names and directory names are also important. Often search engines will give preference to pages that have a keyword in the file name. For instance http://mydomain.com/dog-adopt.html is not as good as http://dog-adopt.net/dog-adopt.html but is certainly better than http://mydomain.com/animal-care.html. The advantage of keywords in file names over keywords in URLs is that they are easier to change, if you decide to move to another niche, for example.

b. Keywords in Page Titles

The page title is another special place because the contents of the , or even longer.

c. Keywords in Headings

Normally headings separate paragraphs into related subtopics and from a literary point of view, it may be pointless to have a heading after every other paragraph but from SEO point of view it is extremely good to have as many headings on a page as possible, especially if they have the keywords in them.

There are no technical length limits for the contents of the

,

,

, ... tags but common sense says that too long headings are bad for page readability. So, like with URLs, you need to be wise with the length of headings. Another issue you need to consider is how the heading will be displayed. If it is Heading 1 (

), generally this means larger font size and in this case it is recommendable to have less than 7-8 words in the heading, otherwise it might spread on 2 or 3 lines, which is not good and if you can avoid it – do it.

II) On Page Optimizations

Before we dig into on page optimizations, we need to consider how the major search engines index pages. Major search engines use spiders (also called robots) to crawl (trace) the web and find pages by following links just like a human browser might. However, there are technical limitations to what spiders can do. Your site's architecture can make a huge difference in a spider's ability to read and index your pages.

An in-depth dissertation on site architecture is beyond the scope of this tutorial. However, if your site employs:

• Mostly Flash content
• Mostly graphic content
• Dynamically rendered pages (PHP, ASP, etc.) with session IDs
• Frames
• Javascript menus

You need to investigate the potential problems spiders are going to have indexing your pages before the following SEO tutorial will be effective. A quick check on the Lynx Viewer will let you see your web site much like the search engine spiders do. Can they see your content and (navigation) links?

SEO lends itself to tunnel vision among the newcomers to the field. The gratification of seeing your pages rising in search engine results for your keyphrases can be addictive. Always keep your visitor in mind when performing your search engine optimizations. Achieving high rankings (and traffic) will only result in higher bandwidth bills if your site does not convert traffic to sales (whether direct or indirect). Never compromise the usability and copy of your site in favor of SEO - avoid SEO tunnel vision. Your conversions/ROI will likely suffer.

Meta tags

A couple of years ago tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization and there was a direct correlation between what you wrote there and your position in search results. However, algorithms got better and today the importance of metadata is decreasing day by day, especially with Google. But still some search engines show metadata (under the clickable link in search results), so users can read what you have written and if they think it is relevant, they might go to your site. Also, some of the specialized search engines still use the metatags when ranking your site.

The meta Description tag is one more way for you to write a description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes and topics your Web site is relevant to. It does not hurt to include at least a brief description, so don't skip it. For instance, for the dog adoption site, the meta Description tag could be something like this:

A potential use of the meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in the meta Keywords tag. For instance, if I were to write the meta keywords tag for the dog adoption site, I would do it like that: <Meta name=“Keywords” Content=“adopt, adoption, dog, dogs, puppy, canine, save a life, homeless animals”>. It is a small boost to search engine top ranking but why miss the chance?

The meta Robots tag deserves more attention. In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don't want it indexed. Listing this pages in the meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed.

Title Tag

Google and most search engines place a lot of emphasis on the title tag for each page. Title tags should include the one or two keyphrases that you will be targeting with that page. The closer the keyphrase is to the beginning of the title, the more weight it carries. Thus keyphrase one, keyphrase two - business name will be more effective than business name - keyphrase one, keyphrase two.

It is a good idea to limit the number of keyphrases you target with any given page to two (three at the very most) per page. Trying to target more keyphrases results in diluted results for all phrases. It is better to add more pages to your site and target additional terms with additional pages and copy. Search engines will index all of your pages, so do not limit yourself to trying to optimize just your home (index) page.

(Meta) Description Tag

Most search engines ignore the description tag as far as keyword relevancy is concerned. It doesn't hurt to work your keywords into the description tag, but if you include the description tag, write it to entice visitors to come to your page. Most search engines use the Description tag to some extent when displaying search results. This is your chance to differentiate your site from all the other results in a search.

(Meta) Keyword Tag

Most search engines completely ignore the keyword tag. Years ago, this tag was used by the search engines for determining relevancy, but it was abused. If you include a keyword tag, keep it short. There is not much point in listing anything other than the keyphrases you have included in the title tag.

Copy

The single most important part of your on-page SEO effort is to ensure that your keyphrases are used within the copy (text) of your page. The keyphrases should be repeated as much as possible without compromising the text. Forcing the phrases into the text in choppy, stilted sentences may impress the search engines, but it will not impress your human visitors. It is counterproductive.

Keyphrases may (and should) be used in:

• heading tags - Use h1, h2, h3, etc. tags to structure the main points on your pages. Use your keyphrases where appropriate.
• main page text - Write about your subject matter. Use your keyphrases where appropriate.
• strong, bold or italics tags - Use around your keyphrases where emphasis is warranted.
• image alt tags - Each image on your page should have an alt tag for visitors with:
• text only browsers
• graphics turned off (dial-up connections, overseas connections, etc.)
• handicapped browsers (with text-to-speech for the sight impaired)

Your alt tag should describe the image using your keyphrases where appropriate.

• File names - choosing keyword or keyphrase rich folder/directory and file names gives you another avenue for introducing your keywords/keyphrases in your internal site links. Use hyphens (dashes) to separate words in keyphrases. Search engines parse hyphens as spaces.

Be sure not to abuse image alt tags or heading tags with keyword stuffing. Search engines may penalize your site for that.

This is all you need to do for basic on page optimizations to produce dramatic results for non-optimized sites. Achieving the right balance of keyphrase repetition and copy that also sells is an art. If you are interested in learning more about SEO copywriting, Karon Thackston's The Step-By-Step Copywriting Course is very good.

III) Off Page Optimizations

Off page optimizations consist entirely of link building strategies. Because it entails third parties, you will often be limited in how much control you can exert. However, knowing what the search engines are looking for can assist you to optimize those opportunities where you do have control.

Search engines evaluate pages that link to yours for relevance. Having a link from a page discussing widget training services will be more helpful to a widget storefront than a link from "Joe Bob's Land of a Million Free Links". In addition to relevance that search engines will appreciate, links from topically related sites can and will drive traffic to your site in their own right.

1) Links

Why Links Are Important

Probably the word that associates best with Web is “links”. That is what hypertext is all about – you link to pages you like and get linked by pages that like your site. Actually, the Web is woven out of interconnected pages and spiders follow the links, when indexing the Web. If not many sites link to you, then it might take ages for search engines to find your site and even if they find you, it is unlikely that you will have high rankings because the quality and quantity of links is part of the algorithms of search engines for calculating relevancy.

Inbound and Outbound Links

Put in layman's terms, there are two types of links that are important for SEO – inbound and outbound links. Outbound links are links that start from your site and lead to another one, while inbound links, or backlinks, come from an external site to yours, e.g. if a.com links to mydomain.com, the link from a.com is an inbound link for mydomain.com.

Backlinks are very important because they are supposed to be a measure of the popularity of your site among the Web audience. It is necessary to say that not all backlinks are equal. There are good and bad backlinks. Good backlinks are from reputable places - preferably from sites with a similar theme. These links do boost search engine ranking. Bad backlinks come from suspicious places – like link farms – and are something to be avoided. Well, if you are backlinked without your knowledge and consent, maybe you should drop the Webmaster a line, asking him or her to remove the backlink.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don't worry - buying links is an established practice and if you are serious about getting to the top, you may need to consider it. But before doing this, you should consider some free alternatives. For instance, some of the good places where you can get quality backlinks are Web directories like http://dmoz.org or http://dir.yahoo.com.

First, look for suitable sites to backlink to you using the Backlinks Builder below. After you identify potential backlinks, it's time to contact the Web master of the site and to start negotiating terms. Sometimes you can agree to a barter deal – i.e. a link exchange – they will put on their site N links to your site and you will put on your site N links to their site - but have in mind that this is a bad, risky deal and you should always try to avoid it.

Internal links (i.e. links from one page to another page on the same site) are also important but not as much as backlinks. In this connection it is necessary to say, that using images for links might be prettier but it is a SEO killer. Instead of having buttons for links, use simple text links. Since search engines spider the text on a page, they can't see all the designer miracles, like gradient buttons or flash animations, so when possible, either avoid using them, or provide a meaningful textual description in the tag, as described next.

2) Anchor text

Anchor text is the most important item in a backlink. While it does matter where a link comes from (i.e. a reputable place or a link farm), what matters more is the actual text the link starts from. Put simply, anchor text is the word(s) that you click on to open the hyperlink – e.g. if we have the best search engine, then “the best search engine” is the anchor text for the hyperlink to google.com. You see that you might have a backlink from a valuable site but if the anchor text is something like “an example of a complete failure”, you will hardly be happy with it.

When you check your backlinks, always check what their anchor text is and if there is a keyword in it. It is a great SEO boost to have a lot of backlinks from quality sites and the anchor text to include our keywords. Check the anchor text of inbound backlinks is with the Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer tool below. Besides the anchor text itself, the text around it is also important.

3) Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

Similar to keyword stuffing, purchasing links in bulk is a practice to be avoided. It gets suspicious if you bartered 1000 links with another site in a day or two. What is more, search engines keep track of link farms (sites that sell links in bulk) and since bought links are a way to manipulate search results, this practice gets punished by search engines. So avoid dealing with link farms because it can cause more harm than do good. Also, outbound links from your site to known Web spammers or “bad guys” are also to be avoided.

As mentioned, link exchange is not a clean deal. Even if it boosts your ranking, it can have many other negative aspects in the long run. First, you do not know if the other party will keep their promise – i.e. they might remove some of the links to you. Second, they might change the context the link appears into. Third, it is really suspicious if you seem to be “married” to another site and 50% or more of your inbound and outbound links are from/to this direction.

When links are concerned, one aspect to have in mind is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times your inbound links, this is bad but it also varies on a case by case basis. If you have a site that links to news sources or has RSS feeds, then having many outbound links is the inevitable price of fresh content.

IV. Content Is King

If you are new to SEO, it might be a surprise for you that text is one of the driving forces to higher rankings. But it is a fact. Search engines (and your readers) love fresh content and providing them with regularly updated, relevant content is a recipe for success. Generally, when a site is frequently updated, this increases the probability that the spider will revisit the site sooner. You can't take for sure that if you update your site daily, the spider will visit it even once a week but if you do not update your contents regularly, this will certainly drop you from the top of search results.

For company sites that are not focused on writing but on manufacturing, constantly adding text can be a problem because generally company sites are not reading rooms or online magazines that update their content daily, weekly or monthly but even for company sites there are reasonable solutions. No matter what your business is, one is for sure – it is always relevant to include a news section on your site – it can be company news or RSS feeds but this will keep the ball rolling.

1. Topical Themes or How to Frequently Add Content to Your Site

If you are doing the SEO for an online magazine, you can consider yourself lucky – fresh content is coming all the time and you just need to occasionally arrange a heading or two or a couple of paragraphs to make the site SEO-friendly. But even if you are doing a SEO for an ordinary company site, it is not all that bad - there are ways to constantly get fresh content that fits into the topic of the site.

One of the intricacies of optimizing a company site is that it has to be serious. Also, if your content smells like advertising and has no practical value for your visitors, this content is not that valuable. For instance, if you are a trade company, you can have promotional texts about your products. But have in mind that these texts must be informational, not just sales hype. And if you have a lot of products to sell, or frequently get new products, or make periodical promotions of particular products and product groups – you can post all this to your site and you will have fresh, topical content.

Also, depending on what your business is about, you can include different kinds of self-updating information like lists of hot new products, featured products, discounted items, even online calculators or order trackers. Unlike promotional pages, this might neither bring you many new visitors, nor improve your ratings but is more than nothing.

One more potential traffic trigger for company sites are news sections. Here you can include news about past and coming events, post reports about various activities, announce new undertakings, etc. Some companies even go further – their CEO keeps a blog, where he or she writes in a more informal style about what is going in the company, in the industry as a whole, or in the world in general. These blogs do attract readers, especially if the information is true, rather than the official story.

An alternative way to get fresh free content are RSS feeds. RSS feeds are gaining more and more popularity and with a little bit of searching, you can get free syndicated content for almost any topic you can think of.

2. Bold and Italic Text

When you have lots of text, the next question is how to make the important items stand out from the crowd – for both humans and search engines. While search engines (and their spiders – the programs that crawl the Web and index pages) cannot read text the way humans do, they do have ways of getting the meaning of a piece of text. Headings are one possibility, bold and italic are another way to emphasize a word or a couple of words that are important. Search engines read the and text and get the idea that what is in bold and/or italic is more important than the rest of the text. But do not use bold and italic too much – this will spoil the effect, rather than make the whole page a search engine favorite.

3. Duplicate Content

When you get new content, there is one important issue – is this content original? Because if it is not, i.e. it is stolen from another site, this will get you into trouble. But even if it is not illegal, i.e. you obtained it for free from an article feed, have in mind that you might not be only one on the Web, who has this particular stuff. If you have the rights to do it, you can change the text a little, so it is not an exact copy of another page and cannot be labeled “duplicate content” by search engines. If you don't manage to escape the duplicate content filter that search engines have imposed recently in their attempts to filter stolen, scrapped, or simply copied contents, your pages could be removed from search results!

Duplicate content became an issue when tricky webmasters started making multiple copies of the same page (under a different name) in order to fool search engines that they have more content than they actually do. As a result of this malpractice, search engines responded with a duplicate content filter that removes suspicious pages. Unfortunately, this filter sometimes removes quite legitimate pages, like product descriptions given from a manufacturer to all its resellers, which must be kept exactly the same.

You see, duplicate content can be a serious problem. But it is not an obstacle that cannot be overcome. First, you need to periodically check the Web for pages that are similar to yours. You can use http://copyscape.com. If you identify pages that are similar to yours (and it is not you who have illegitimately copied them), you could notify the webmaster of the respective site(s) to remove them. Also, you could change a little the text on your site, hoping that this way you will avoid the duplicate content penalty. Even with product descriptions, you can add commentary or opinion on the same page and this could be a way out.

V. Visual Extras and SEO

As already mentioned, search engines have no means to index directly extras like images, sounds, flash movies, javascript. Instead, they rely on you to provide meaningful textual description and based on it they can index these files. In a sense, the situation is similar to that with text 10 or so years ago – you provide a description in the metatag and search engines uses this description to index and process your page. If technology advances further, one day it might be possible for search engines to index images, movies, etc. but for the time being this is just a dream.

1. Images

Images are an essential part of any Web page and from a designer point of view they are not an extra but a most mandatory item for every site. However, here designers and search engines are on two poles because for search engines every piece of information that is buried in an image is lost. When working with designers, sometimes it takes a while to explain to them that having textual links (with proper anchor text) instead of shining images is not a whim and that clear text navigation is really mandatory. Yes, it can be hard to find the right balance between artistic performance and SEO-friendliness but since even the finest site is lost in cyberspace if it cannot be found by search engines, a compromise to its visual appearance cannot be avoided.

With all that said, the idea is not to skip images at all. Sure, nowadays this is impossible because the result would be a most ugly site. Rather the idea is that images should be used for illustration and decoration, not for navigation or even worse – for displaying text (in a fancy font, for example). And the most important – in the attribute of the tag, always provide a meaningful textual description of the image. The HTML specification does not require this but search engines do. Also, it does not hurt to give meaningful names to the image files themselves rather than name them image1.jpg, image2.jpg, imageN.jpg. For instance, in the next example the image file has an informative name and the alt provides enough additional information: . Well, don't go to extremes like writing 20-word tags for 1 pixel images because this also looks suspicious and starts to smell like keyword-stuffing.

2. Animation and Movies

The situation with animation and movies is similar to that with images – they are valuable from a designer's point of view but are not loved by search engines. For instance, it is still pretty common to have an impressive Flash introduction on the home page. You just cannot imagine what a disadvantage with search engines this is – it is a number one rankings killer! And it gets even worse, if you use Flash to tell a story that can be written in plain text, hence crawled and indexed by search engines. One workaround is to provide search engines with a HTML version of the Flash movie but in this case make sure that you have excluded the original Flash movie from indexing (this is done in the robots.txt file but the explanation of this file is not a beginners topic and that is why it is excluded from this tutorial), otherwise you can be penalized for duplicate content.

There are rumors that Google is building a new search technology that will allow to search inside animation and movies and that the .swf format will contain new metadata that can be used by search engines, but until then, you'd better either refrain from using (too much) Flash, or at least provide a textual description of the movie (you can use an tag to describe the movie).

3. Frames

It is a good news that frames are slowly but surely disappearing from the Web. 5 or 10 years ago they were an absolute hit with designers but never with search engines. Search engines have difficulties indexing framed pages because the URL of the page is the same, no matter which of the separate frames is open. For search engines this was a shock because actually there were 3 or 4 pages and only one URL, while for search engines 1 URL is 1 page. Of course, search engines can follow the links to the pages in the frameset and index them but this is a hurdle for them.

If you still insist on using frames, make sure that you provide a meaningful description of the site in the tag. The following example is not for beginners but even if you do not understand everything in it, just remember that the <noframes> tag is the place to provide an alternative version (or at least a short description) of your site for search engines and users whose browsers do not support frames. If you decide to use the <noframes> tag, maybe you'd like to read more about it before you start using it. </p> <p>Example: <noframes> <p> This site is best viewed in a browser that supports frames. </p><p> Welcome to our site for prospective dog adopters! Adopting a homeless dog is a most noble deed that will help save the life of the poor creature. </p>

4. JavaScript

This is another hot potato. It is known by everybody that pure HTML is powerless to make complex sites with a lot of functionality (anyway, HTML was not intended to be a programming languages for building Web applications, so nobody expects that you can use HTML to handle writing to a database or even for storing session information) as required by today's Web users and that is why other programming languages (like JavaScript, or PHP) come to enhance HTML. For now search engines just ignore JavaScript they encounter on a page. As a result of this, first if you have links that are inside the JavaScript code, chances are that they will not be spidered. Second, if JavaScript is in the HTML file itself (rather than in an external .js file that is invoked when necessary) this clutters the html file itself and spiders might just skip it and move to the next site. Just for your information, there is a

VI. Static Versus Dynamic URLs

Based on the previous section, you might have got the impression that the algorithms of search engines try to humiliate every designer effort to make a site gorgeous. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either. Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like http://domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not tell much about the contents of the page.

There are a couple of good reasons why static URLs score better than dynamic URLs. First, dynamic URLs are not always there – i.e. the page is generated on request after the user performs some kind of action (fills a form and submits it or performs a search using the site's search engine). In a sense, such pages are nonexistent for search engines, because they index the Web by crawling it, not by filling in forms.

Second, even if a dynamic page has already been generated by a previous user request and is stored on the server, search engines might just skip it if it has too many question marks and other special symbols in it. Once upon a time search engines did not index dynamic pages at all, while today they do index them but generally slower than they index static pages.

The idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are special tools (different for different platforms and servers) that rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like normal HTML pages. Try the URL Rewriting Tool below, it will convert the cryptic text from the previous example into something more readable, like http://mydomain.com/product-categoryid-1-productid-5.

VII. Promoting Your Site to Increase Traffic

The main purpose of SEO is to make your site visible to search engines, thus leading to higher rankings in search results pages, which in turn brings more traffic to your site. And having more visitors (and above all buyers) is ultimately the goal in sites promotion. For truth's sake, SEO is only one alternative to promote your site and increase traffic – there are many other online and offline ways to do accomplish the goal of getting high traffic and reaching your target audience. We are not going to explore them in this tutorial but just keep in mind that search engines are not the only way to get visitors to your site, although they seem to be a preferable choice and a relatively easy way to do it.

1. Submitting Your Site to Search Directories, forums and special sites

After you have finished optimizing your new site, time comes to submit it to search engines. Generally, with search engines you don't have to do anything special in order to get your site included in their indices – they will come and find you. Well, it cannot be said exactly when they will visit your site for the first time and at what intervals they will visit it later but there is hardly anything that you can do to invite them. Sure, you can go to their Submit a Site pages in submit the URL of your new site but by doing this do not expect that they will hop to you right away. What is more, even if you submit your URL, most search engines reserve the right to judge whether to crawl your site or not. Anyway, here are the URLs for submitting pages in the three major search engines: Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

In addition to search engines, you may also want to have your site included in search directories as well. Although search directories also list sites that are relevant to a given topic, they are different from search engines in several aspects. First, search directories are usually maintained by humans and the sites in them are reviewed for relevancy after they have been submitted. Second, search directories do not use crawlers to get URLs, so you need to go to them and submit your site but once you do this, you can stay there forever and no more efforts on your side are necessary. Some of the most popular search directories are DMOZ and Yahoo! (the directory, not the search engine itself) and here are the URLs of their submissions pages: DMOZ and Yahoo!.

Sometimes posting a link to your site in the right forums or special sites can do miracles in terms of traffic. You need to find the forums and sites that are leaders in the fields of interest to you but generally even a simple search in Google or the other major search engines will retrieve their names. For instance, if you are a hardware freak, type “hardware forums” in the search box and in a second you will have a list of sites that are favorites to other hardware freaks. Then you need to check the sites one by one because some of them might not allow posting links to commercial sites. Posting into forums is more time-consuming than submitting to search engines but it could also be pretty rewarding.

2. Specialized Search Engines

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are not the only search engines on Earth, nor even the only general-purpose ones. There are many other general-purpose and specialized search engines and some of them can be really helpful for reaching your target audience. You just can't imagine for how many niches specialized search engines exist – from law, to radiostations, to educational one! Some of them are actually huge sites that gather Webwide resources on a particular topic but almost all of them have sections for submitting links to external sites of interest. So, after you find the specialized search engines in your niche, go to their site and submit your URL – this could prove more trafficworthy than striving to get to the top of Google.

3. Paid Ads and Submissions

We have already mentioned some other alternatives to search engines – forums, specialized sites and search engines, search directories – but if you need to make sure that your site will be noticed, you can always resort to paid ads and submissions. Yes, paid listings are a fast and guaranteed way to appear in search results and most of the major search engines accept payment to put your URL in the Paid Links section for keywords of interest to you but you also must have in mind that users generally do not trust paid links as much as they do with the normal ones – in a sense it looks like you are bribing the search engine to place you where you can't get on your own, so think twice about the pros and cons of paying to get listed.

Free SEO Tools (99 SEO Tools)

This Free SEO Tools a page with SEO Tools scripts that are free from your use. These tools will help you to optimize your website and move your search engine position higher.

View my SEO Tools page which has a collection of 99 tools from other sites.

• Website Analysis Tool (#1)
• Directory Search Tool (#2)
• Keyword Tool (#3)
• Keyword Data Miner (#4)
• Website Keyword Analysis (#5)
• Keyword Top 10 Site Info (#6)
• PageRank Tool (#7)
• Site Stats Tool (#8)
• Page Rank Checker
• Internal Page Rank
• Link Popularity
• Indexed Pages
• DMOZ Listing Checker
• SERP Checker

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Key Word Density

Key Word Density is the measure of the occurrence of targeted search terms with in a web page as a percentage of the page's total word count. When performing Search engine optimization an effort is made to ensure that an adequate density of key words / phrases occurs through out the web page. These key words can be represented in various areas of the page including:-

* Title tags

* The description Meta tag

* heading Tags

* the body text

* alt text on images

* incoming and outgoing links

Key Parameters of SEO: Prominence, Weight, Frequency, Proximity

Keyword Prominence

Prominence is a measure of keyword importance that indicates how close a keyword is to the beginning of the analyzed page area (e.g. page title). If some word is used at the beginning of the title, headings, or close to the beginning of the visible text of the page, it is considered more important than other words. Prominence is calculated separately for each important page area. HTML markup lets you emphasize certain document areas against the others. The most important items are placed at the top, and their importance is gradually reduced towards the bottom. Keyword prominence works much the same way. Usually, the closer a keyword to the top of a page and to the beginning of a sentence, the higher its prominence is. However, search engines also check if the keyword is present in the middle and at the bottom of the page, and you should be aware of that.

100% prominence is given to a keyword or keyphrase that appears at the beginning of the analyzed page area. The keyword/keyphrase in the middle of the analyzed area will have 50% prominence.

Let's imagine our key phrase is "Office furniture" and look at the following examples of possible titles we could give to our pages:

1. Furniture Market – Office furniture at affordable prices
2. Office furniture at affordable prices – FurnitureMarket.com

The second title will definitely do better for "Office furniture" since the prominence of our key phrase is 100% (this word combination goes from the very beginning), while in the first example it's only around 60%.

The importance of keyword prominence is illustrated by the following example:

A search on Google for "Digital Camera", shows the following result for the top rank -

Digital Camera Reviews and News: Digital Photography Review ...

Current digital photography news, digital camera reviews, articles and discussion forums.

As you see, the word combination "Digital camera" has a 100% prominence in the page title.

Keyword weight / keyword density

These two parameters are used as synonyms, although there's a slight mathematical difference between them. However, in this course both terms will refer to one and the same indicator - a measure of the percentage of keywords to the general number of words on a page. The results on the SERP (search engine result page) are ranked, in part, based on the percentage of words on a page that are similar to the words used in the query. When keyword density is artificially inflated, it is called "keyword stuffing" and is considered spam by all search engines.

In other words, keyword density, or weight, is a measure of how often a keyword is found in a specific area of the Web page like a title, heading, anchor name, visible text, etc. against all other words. Unlike keyword frequency, which is just a count, keyword density is a ratio which depends on the type of keyword, i.e. if the keyword consists of a single word, its density within some context will be lower than if it consisted of two words or a phrase. Density is calculated as the number of words in the key phrase multiplied by frequency and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword). So, to increase the keyword density, you should either add some more keywords or reduce the number of words in the page area. The proportion of the keywords to all words will become larger, so will the keyword density.

Let's assume we're optimizing for "long-range weather forecast software" and look at the following title examples:

1. Weather Screen: long-range weather forecast software
2. Weather Screen is a long-range weather forecast software that shows weather forecasts and daily horoscopes on your desktop

In terms of keyword density, the first title is much more profitable: the keyword density there approaches 65%, while in the second one it hardly reaches 40%.

In the BODY text of the page, keyword density is almost never this high. The recommended density for body text is 3-7% for each keyword you optimize for that page. (remember that each page should generally be optimized for no more than three keywords or phrases). This means that every keyword or keyphrase should repeat 3-7 times for every 100 words.

By excluding the stop words like "a", "and", "for", "at", "to" (generally, all auxiliary parts of speech – prepositions, articles, and conjunctions), you increase the weight of your keywords.

Keyword frequency

Frequency is the number of times your keyword is used in the analyzed area of the page. Unlike density, it does not depend on the total number of words on your page– it's an absolute index. If you repeat your key phrase 7 times, your frequency will be 7, no matter if your page has 7,000 words or only these keywords 7 times and nothing more.

Search engines use frequency as another measure of keyword importance. Pages with more keywords will be rated as more relevant results, and as such get higher rankings. However, using too many keywords is considered "keyword stuffing" (as well as excessive attempts to artificially increase your keyword density), and most search engines will penalize you for this practice. It is known as the oldest spammer's technique to artificially inflate rankings.

To see how frequency influences rankings, do a search on Google for any competitive and generalized keyword.

In our case, it is "design" and the first result on Google goes:

Design Museum : London - design, architecture and fashion.

London 's museum of international contemporary design.

We see that keyword frequency in title is 2 and it is repeated in the extract from the body text.

Keyword proximity

Some engines, such as Google, use the concept of "keyword proximity" as part of their ranking formulas. "Keyword proximity" refers to how close keywords that make your key phrase are to each other. Remember our advice to optimize for a phrase that consists of more than one word. You should try to use your keyword combination as a unit, keeping your keywords together; however it's not always possible to sound natural by rigidly sticking to this rule. In these cases, try to put your keywords as close together as possible and make sure your sentences are clear.

International Widgets Inc is selling electronic widgets for 7 years. International Widgets is a company that specializes in electronic devices, widgets and other stuff...

You see that we try to use words "electronic" and "widgets" close to each other in the text so the spiders will understand we are targeting people who seek these kinds of widgets.

The logic of the search engine is such that if the words follow each other as they are typed in the search box, chances are these words are relevant. If they all appear in one paragraph, then the page is possibly relevant. The use of this is perhaps most obvious with Google due to the way they usually provide a description. Google will normally provide "quotes" from the text of a page that contain the keywords.

For instance, let's search Google for "Web design". One of the top results has the following description:

"Learn good web page design by looking at bad web pages…"

Notice the proximity of the words "web" and design (together with the frequency of "web").

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Target of SEO

· to create a SEO friendly web site,

· to increase site traffic,

· to attract targeted visitors (potential customers, clients)

· to have ranking higher than competitors

Basic SEO Tips

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods. A good rule of thumb is if your pages do not contain any words that reflect the content of the site you are linking to, do not link to it.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

Benefits of Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

· Search engine optimization will absolutely provide the lowest-cost traffic to your site but results generally take months to show up

· Search engine optimization could be thought as an investment for your site

· Search engine optimization involves a one-time fee and minimal monthly outlay

· Search engine optimization is time-consuming to implement, can mean recoding entire site

· Search engine optimization take months for results to kick in

· There is no guarantee for a specific ranking in Search engine optimization.

· Targets a relatively low number of high-trafficked keyword phrases in Search engine optimization.

· Over the long-term is much cheaper than pay-per-click

· Produces long-lasting results - good Search engine optimization can last for a year or more

· Substantial Increase in Search Engine Traffic, When the site ranks for words which people search often we get lots of targeted traffic, Compare the Organic listing search engine traffic with other types of online advertisements this one is much cheaper,

· Return of Investment is very fast and well worthy, Since Search engine optimization send only targeted traffic to a site the ROI for a site is quick and pretty high

· Return of Investment has direct impact in the conversion Ratio since this is targeted traffic the conversion rate is very high.

· Search engine traffic never stops once achieved high ranking for you, Search engines promote your site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

BLOG:

A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically — like a what's new page or a journal. The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly — from links and commentary about other web sites, to news about a company/person/idea, to diaries, photos, poetry, mini-essays, project updates, even fiction.

Blog posts are like instant messages to the web.

Many blogs are personal, "what's on my mind" type musings. Others are collaborative efforts based on a specific topic or area of mutual interest. Some blogs are for play. Some are for work. Some are for both.

Blogs are also excellent team/department/company/family communication tools. They help small groups communicate in a way that is simpler and easier to follow than email or discussion forums. Use a private blog on an intranet to allow team members to post related links, files, quotes, or commentary. Set up a family blog where relatives can share personal news. A blog can help keep everyone in the loop, promote cohesiveness and group culture, and provide an informal "voice" of a project or department to outsiders

Sandbox

The google sandbox prevents sites from ranking in the Search Engine Results for around 6-15 months if your site was not in googles index previous to 15 months ago and you have more relevant anchor text than your competitor then your site is more than likely in the sandbox.

Doorway pages

Doorways are typically, in size, small websites. The sole purpose, are most of the time, to earn commission by either redirecting you, or placing ads all over the place. The site itself usually present no real value for its visitors. Google is smart - it can detect these kind of pages, and you will be penalized when caught.

Ways to Build Backlinks

Even if plenty of backlinks come to your site the natural way, additional quality backlinks are always welcome and the time you spend building them is not wasted. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories.

The first step in building backlinks is to find the places from which you can get quality backlinks.

Getting Listed in Directories

If you are serious about your Web presence, getting listed in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo is a must – not only because this is a way to get some quality backlinks for free, but also because this way you are easily noticed by both search engines and potential visitors. Generally inclusion in search directories is free but the drawback is that sometimes you have to wait a couple of months before you get listed in the categories of your choice.

Forums and Article Directories

Generally search engines index forums, so posting in forums and blogs is also a way to get quality backlinks with the anchor text you want. If the forum or blog is a respected one, a backlink is valuable. However, in some cases the forum or blog administrator can edit your post, or even delete it if it does not fit into the forum or blog policy. Also, sometimes administrators do not allow links in posts, unless they are relevant ones. In some rare cases (which are more an exception than a rule) the owner of a forum or a blog would have banned search engines from indexing it and in this case posting backlinks is pointless.

While forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming because generally articles are longer than posts and need careful thinking while writing them. But it is also worth and it is not so difficult to do.

News Announcements and Press Releases

Although this is hardly an everyday way to build backlinks, it is an approach that gives good results, if handled properly. There are many sites (for instance, here is a list of some of them) that publish for free or for a fee news announcements and press releases. A professionally written press release about an important event can bring you many, many visitors and the backlink from a respected site to yours is a good boost to your SEO efforts. The tricky part is that you cannot release press releases if there is nothing newsworthy. That is why we say that news announcements and press releases are not a commodity way to build backlinks.

MISCELLANEOUS POINTS

1. SEO is also known as Organic SEO.

2. Finding the proper keywords to use for optimization is the most important phase of the SEO process.

3. Links count as a vote for your site.

4. The most important part of your website is quality content.

5. We must choose keywords carefully.

6. When you want search engines to crawl your entire website, the best thing to do is adding a site map to your website

7. The least amount of keywords you can place in the title, the more weight Google will give to each of the keywords and the higher you will rank.

8. Keywords increases our website Traffic.

9. Keywords are at the heart of achieving high search engine rankings.

10. Link building helps drive in traffic.

11. First, take care about the ratio between outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links are times your inbound, this is bad. Second (and more important) is the risk that your link exchange partners are link farms. If this is the case, you could even be banned from search engines, so it is too risky to indulge in link exchange programs.

12. A lot of search engine optimization techniques involve editing the basic HTML code. At least you should be able to view the source code of any page and understand what it all means, and basically edit it as necessary.

SEO tips for High Ranking in Google

1) Use the right keyword phrase
2) Put your keyword phrase in your title tag
3) Write a compelling description tag
4) Use H1 tags
5) Get the right Keyword Ratio
6) Use alt tags and description tags on images
7) Get quality one-way incoming links
8) Informative Articles
9) Use Social book marking

Use the right keyword phrase

Title character count to be 60 characters. The first three of four words in your title tag should be the key word phrase you are trying to optimize for.

Write a compelling description tag

Title tags are for search engines, description tags are for people. Spend time researching and writing a description tag that compels the reader to click on your listing. Come up with a great offer, use action words. Use shock and awe. Use anything that will get them to click.

Use H1 tags

An often neglected search engine optimization technique is to put your keyword phrase in H1 tags on your page. This tells Google that the following text is about your keyword phrase. Google weights H1 tags nearly as highly as title tags. This tip alone can drastically improve your Google. Similarly, the use of bold and strong html tags can emphasize a key word phrase within the paragraph text where it may not be appropriate to use H1 or H2 tags.

Get the right Keyword Ratio

Aim for a keyword density of around 3-5% of the page contents. Try to work your key word phrase into the page so that it reads naturally. This may take some research and analysis of successful web sites. Remember to use headings and sub-headings that include your key words.

Use alt tags and description tags on images

Key words used image file names, alt tags and description tags add to the key word density of any web page. They doesn't make a huge difference, but every little bit helps. In some product classes a Google image search may lead web surfers to your web site.

Get quality one-way incoming links

Links can be generated through article marketing and directory submissions As far as Google is concerned; link exchanges are just about dead. They can help to get your web site spidered and indexed more quickly, but these days they add very little in terms of Google search engine rankings unless the link is on a trusted site and that site has excellent page rank. Wikipedia and DMOZ are examples of such trusted sites.

Informative Articles

A more effective approach is to write interesting and informative articles and submit them to article directories. Make sure that you use the author bio/resource box to maximum advantage by using your key word phrase in the link anchor text, AND, by pointing the anchor text to the correct page. Your home page may not be the best choice of pages for your selected key phrase. This will also ensure that more pages than just your home page gets indexed.

Use Social book marking

If you have something newsworthy, humorous, quirky, unique or shocking to say, submit a link to your web page to sites like digg.com or redit.com. These up and coming web 2.0 power houses can create a buzz overnight driving thousands of interested visitors to your web site. Note, just because you build it doesn't mean they will come. If it's boring link it will quickly get buried by newer and more interesting stories. But what the hell, it's free to submit links to these sites and you never know your luck.

If you use all the above mantra’s then definitely your site will rank among top ten on the Google searches. Just go ahead do the best for successful future in the internet marketing world.

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