Beginners Guide To Search Engine Optimization
Once you have all of your ideas for your website, before building, you need to think strategy. This is the strategy I use and works for my style of search engine optimization. Not all professionals use this style, but you will probably figure out your own.
1. The first thing you want to do is brainstorm. Have your idea in place. Ask youself this. How will I build my site and how will the people find it? Go to the major search engines and find all your competitors websites. Use the top 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN and keep a list of the first 10 results for each search engine. You can also see your competitors keywords or phrase by right clicking an empty area of the website page, choose view source look at the meta data. You will sometimes see keywords if they were placed in the site. Once you have your list go to each of their websites and see how they are laid out and what keywords they are targeting. Keep a list of the keywords or phrases they are targeting and cross reference the same keywords with keyword research tools. These keyword tools usually tell you how many times each word was searched. Keep a list of all the top phrases that are relevant to your website topic. Each page needs to have a different set of key phrases. For example my site. My top 3 pages are (in order) the home page, search engine optimization page and website marketing page. Have your main phrase on the home page, keywords that only have to do with search engine optimization on the SEO page and website marketing key words for that page.
2. Now that all the keyword research and brainstorming is complete think about the internal link structure of your website. How are all the pages going to link together? What keywords am I going to use per page and what keywords am I going to save the names of the pages?
Example Table
| Web Page |
Main Keyword Keyword |
Page Name |
| Home Page |
Search Engine Internet Matketing |
index.html |
| Search Engine Optimization Page |
Search Engine Optimziation |
search-engine-optimization.html |
| Website Marketing Page |
Website Marketing |
website-marketing.html |
|
Notice how the main keyword matches the webpage.html. Try to do this with all pages and try not to exceed more than 3 words per each page. Also on a side note, do not use underscores. Only use hyphens. Some search engines cannot parse underscores.
3. This step is pretty easy. Build the basics of your home page. Basically find out what links are going to be on your home page. After the home page, start with all of the sub pages and link the pages together. Don’t even worry about the content yet.
4. Now you have a fully functional website with no content. All your link structure is set. Each page has one main keyword phrase. Use a keyword suggestion tool once more per page now. Once you have gathered all keywords per page, it’s time to develop title tags and meta tags.
5. Setting up a title tag.
When you set up a title tag it’s important to know how many characters you put in a title. You do not want to add more than 80 characters in the title tag. Characters are letters, spaces, numbers and any other keystrokes on your keyboard. The title tag is the piece of code inside the HEAD tag of the website. This is a key factor to search engine optimization. It’s recommended to put the main key phrase in the title tag.
Example of Title Tag
6. Setting up meta tags. Search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo read mostly the description of the meta tags. It is still recommend to add. Search engines still read through the meta data.
Setting up keywords is simple. When you use keyword research tools, organize your keywords from most searched to lowest and choose the desired keyword for your site. You want to set up the keyword section of the meta data the same way. Try to use two to three word phrases instead of one word phrases.
The description usually appears in the search engine results and is inserted right below the title tag. When you type a keyword in Google, the results that pull up in the natural ranks is the title tag and description.
Screen shot of natural listing from google displaying Title Tag and description.
Try not to put more than 250 characters in the description. Create the description off of the main keyphrase for the page you are optimizing followed by other keywords and make sure it is a well read sentence.
7. Once the title tags and meta data is set up insert them in all of the pages of the site.
8. Now you are ready to create content. This step is easy once all of the above steps are complete. Write your content around the keywords you selected per page. The main keyword will become the heading tag for the site (Preferably an h1 tag. Only use one h1 tag per page). You will learn more about heading tags in the advanced section of search engine internet marketing. You want to take time when creating content writing especially when writing around your key phrases. You want to make sure all of the search engines scan through every page.
9. Once your website is complete upload it to the web server and submit to the search engine only once. You can use our free website submission tool. It will submit you to 250 search engines.
These are the basics of search engine internet marketing and optimization. If you have any question please email me direct at sd@stevedifabio.com or you can call me at (480) 570-3661
