Website Managers

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a buzzword that has been around for several years. There are as many misconceptions about SEO as there are website managers. Most webmasters think SEO is too complex and not worth the effort. Others believe that SEO will get your website banned from the search engines. There are a few that actively practice SEO.

Fact #1: SEO can be complex if you want to compete with the big guys. SEO is all about outperforming your competitors. That means the better you do SEO than your competitors, the more success you will have.

Fact #2: SEO can get your website banned from the search engines if you break the rules. There are Black Hat tricks to SEO that will ultimately get you on the blacklist of all search engines, but that is not the focus of this article.

Fact #3: Basic SEO can be simple and effective. Here are a few steps to increase the ranking of your website. We will start with the basics.

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1. Choose Your Niche Keyword Phrase

SEO focuses on being a little bit better than your competition on your selected keyword phrase or phrases. Each page of your website should focus on a single keyword phrase. Two or three words in a phrase work best. Make sure that people are actually searching these phrases as well. Wordtracker and Overture are just two of many methods to check for usability. If you optimize your website for the wrong keyword phrases, you are wasting your time. Not only will you not get the traffic you want, your visitors could be looking for the wrong service.

2. Set Your HTML Tags Right

Your keyword phrase must be in the TITLE tag of your page. The keywords and description META tags are not used by many search engines, but they can still come in handy on pages where a good description is not at the top of the page. Make sure to have a header 1 (H1) tag with the keyword phrase placed at the top of your page. That header will describe the page contents.

Avoid having an H2 tag with the keyword phrase. Take control over the look and feel via cascading style sheets (CSS). This way it is much easier to control the appearance of your website and it keeps the HTML code free of clutter.

Sprinkle your keyword phrase throughout the web page. Place your keyword phrase 2-3 times near the top, once within the first 25 characters and once in the last 25 characters of your text. Change the style variation of the keyword phrase. Make sure you have at least one underlined, one bold and one italic variation of the keyword phrase.

3. Check For Errors

Spell checking is a must. Search engines do not like spelling errors on your web page very well. However, you can include misspelled words in the keywords section of your META tags to help people find you. Also check for broken links. Broken links hurt your ranking.

This short introduction can improve your search engine rankings. Not all of the other SEO tactics are this easy. What we did here was start with the On-Page SEO, which is only part of the process. To really dominate the search engines you should practice a well-planned and executed linking strategy. This is called Off-Page SEO. Off-Page SEO is your most important task as a webmaster or website manager.

The details of a successful Off-Page SEO strategy are too lengthy for the content of this article. However, you can get a good start on them by downloading my book on How to Get Free Website Traffic. To get access to that manual, subscribe to my Internet Marketing Newsletter.

Jim Hutchinson is the Project Manager for Website Managers. He has studied Internet Marketing from some of the most influential leaders. Many of those resources are available on Affiliate Referral Sources.
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