SEO - Basic Search Engine Optimization

Here, I’ll talk about some of the most important steps needed to be done, for proper search engine marketing or optimization. These have proven to be the 2007 favoured SEO steps. First two steps are just a guide to the proper way of choosing your keywords.

1- Perform a keyword research for your site, to come up with a list of good keywords of relevency to your site. Use a keyword research tool. Wordtracker is a famous one along with Overture. I personally favour another tool called KeywordElite, simply because it is supreme and also includes results from wordtracker and the rest. You can read about it here.

2- Determine the competition using your keyword research tool. You must come up with two or three keywords of your choice, that have high KEI factors. That means that they are searched for a good no. of times daily/ weekly, while at the same time don’t have a lot of competition or sites using them.

3- Now listen carefully… this is mid 2007 “compatible” lol… Include the keywords in the “title tags”. Title tags seem to be of high importance these days. Same keywords have to be mentioned in the “body tags”, though title tags are more important.

4- Keywords in H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on search engine rankings while keywords in the H1 tags DON’T have an effect on the rankings (Can you believe it?)

5- Making your keywords “bold”, “strong” or “italic” have a slight effect on the rankings.

6- If you use your keywords as the names of images and as Alt-text of an image, you will rank MUCH higher, instead of using random names for your images’ names and alt tags.

7- Size of your website’s page should be small. The smaller the better your ranking.

8- Shorter urls make a difference BIG TIME! It is kind of a new trend that search engines like shorter urls.

9- Also inbound links and pageranks still have a BIG influence on search engine ranking , especially Google.

Here are some important resources and services of SEO. The SEO-Lab which I posted about here, and Tom’s Search Engine Traffic -Unlimited Web Traffic.

P.S. This is offtopic, but wanted to inform you: I’ve just started my new Home Depot blog! Check it out if you are interested!

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Technorati Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, keyword research tool, keywordelite, keyword elite, wordtracker, overture, title tags, meta tags, tom’s search engine web traffic, seo lab, keyword competition, inbound links, page rank, google, bold, strong, italic