The Rules Of SEO

Foreword By The Author

If you want to build a successful business on the Internet, you need to spend as much as you can afford on a Google AdWords campaign and other forms of advertising. However, it has been proved over and over again in the search engine marketing arena that at least forty per cent of the time, your clients will find you through Google or one of the other search engines. This fact alone makes it very important for any serious Internet business owner to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you can’t do it yourself, at least you won’t be left in the dark on the methodologies if you decide to hire an SEO specialist.
Mike Alexander
Author of ‘Internet Traps, Ripoffs And Pitfalls‘

Website Design And Navigation

These are the most important aspects of SEO. A website that succeeds with both search engines and website visitors is one that is easily navigated and is designed in simple HTML. When these two elements are combined, they make for a good visitor experience and easy crawling by the search engine spiders.

So it follows that some of the things to avoid in website design are dynamic pages and URLs, frames, flash elements, Javascript, and image maps for web page interlinking or sitemap generation.

Keyword Research

SEO is based on the premise that an unknown number of Internet users are searching for a host of things by typing in search terms utilysing keywords. To discover popular keywords that are appropriate to the business or niche that your website represents, do some exhaustive research on the subject. It will pay off handsomely.

In deciding what keywords to use, there is one over-riding rule: ‘the more specific the better’. If you own a dating site, for example, “true love” or “soul mate” might be too broad. Run the keywords on Yahoo and Wordtracker. You might find keywords that are more appropriate and focused to your site, such as “true love for marriage”, and similar terms.

Keyword Density And Relevance

Search engines, especially Google, determine what websites should appear at the top of your search results based on their relevance. This is determined in part by keyword density, or in other words, how many instances the word or phrase appears in the web page’s content. Write your content accordingly. Do not spam, though. Aside from sounding gibberish, spam content also gets flagged by search engines and websites containing it are removed from their indices.

Relevance And Inbound Links

Search engines also consider inbound links to your site (specifically, their number and quality) to determine your website’s ‘popularity’ as judged by the Internet population. That’s why you need to make time to find sites related to yours in terms of your market niche. Also make sure that hyperlinks to your site found on other websites have your keywords in them.

Don’t ‘scoop and link’ though. At one time Google penalized websites that linked with 200 to 300 other sites per month and they still change their algorithms (the criteria by which they decide Page Rankings) constantly.

An Opportunity On Each Page

On each page on your website there is actually an opportunity for you to rank for a different keyword each time. Notice how two different pages on the same website are generated for the same keyword. Go ahead and assign different keywords to each. Write and optimize accordingly.