Search Engine Optimization is an Art Form
I’ll repeat that … Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art form, it’s not a programming language or coding method. I like to think of SEO as an orchestra. The drum, tuba, clarinet and all the rest of the instruments may sound nice when played by themselves, but sound really GREAT when they all play together in an orchestrated manner. SEO is much the same … there are certain pieces of the puzzle that you work to improve on, and when they all come together, you have an optimized website.
Getting top listings doesn’t come by accident. If you know SEO techniques you should try to build them into your site as you build it. That is probably not your situation and you have a site built by someone else and it needs to be optimized. I suggest that your focus your first efforts on optimization after you have a completed site.
I have seen many people make the mistake of jumping into SEO without having the knowledge to really make the correct changes to their site. These people inevitably load their pages with keywords and do a lot of things that are just going to hurt your ranking, or the ability of your site to ever be ranked.
There is a difference between using a keyword five times on a page, and 50 times. The engines want to find sites that appear natural, and if you ask me, do not appear to have been optimized! This is very important, and a lot more important than most people ever will realize. The sites that seem to rank the best are those that do not appear to be excessively optimized, and have lots and lots of inbound links using many different keyword combinations for anchor text … yes, even “Click Here”.
Although SEO really is a lot of common sense, the adage that common sense isn’t common can play very true with SEO. You need to do some studying of SEO techniques in order to develop your strategy, for your site. Visit all the sites you can and read. Then read more. Everything that you need to know in order to succeed with your site in online as available information. If you apply optimization techniques properly to your website, and get inbound links, you will succeed.
Let’s face it, without listings “above the fold”, (visible without scrolling) on the first page at Google, you are just not going to get many visitors. You need to get your site into these top positions in order to make any real advancement in your online marketing.
So you need to work on all of the different parts of any given web page that will make it conform closely to the search engines algorithms, well for Google, MSN and Yahoo! anyway. They are the three big engines that will generate 99+% of all the traffic you will get from the organic search engine listings.
The main items that you will want to work on to get optimized are the title tag, the meta description tag, the meta keywords tag, code attributes like alt=, title=, summary=, H1 and H2 tags, and possibly the H3 tag, keyword density, navigation and/or ease of navigation and anchor text and internal linking are all among the main things to work on for on-site optimization.
