Optimize Your Webpages with SEO

Firs things first. I am far from a SEO guru and nor do I want to be. I have learned everything I know from The Keyword Academy. Mark and Court are awesome guys and the give you the tools needed to help push your site beyond it’s competition. They have decided to take a different approach to SEO and making money online, by telling you the truth about how to get quickly ranked in Google. Much of the information I have gathered has be written from my own experience and reorganized their their site.

Ok moving on.

Search engine optimization is a tough subject to tackle. Just ‘Googling’ the term SEO will yield (at the time of this posting) around 187 million websites dedicated to this topic. So this should give you an idea of the importance of this subject. But what is search engine optimization (SEO) all about? Trust me, SEO is a never-ending and changing labyrinth that will leave many of you puzzled and perpetually confused, but in this section I will attempt to give you a good understanding of the basics.

SEO is 100% about getting your site to rank well in search engines, more specifically in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Google currently receives about 72% (at the time of this post) of the market share in the English speaking search market, so its best to focus all of your attention at them. In recent years Yahoo and MSN have been shifting their search engines to mimic how Google works. So your efforts with Google will actually make a pretty significant difference with the other two.

Search Engine Positioning and Traffic Potential

Typically, the earlier your web site (or web page) appears in Google’s search results, the more traffic you can expect to get. If you’re #7 for a term or phrase related to your business, you can expect to get more traffic than you would get at #13. If you’re #1 for the term, you would get more traffic than you could get at #7.

Each search phrase is entirely different in its ability to bring traffic, because different numbers of people search for different phrases. ‘Food’ is searched for over 6,000,000 times each month in Google but ‘beach food’ is only searched for about 500 times per month.

You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find out how many times each phrase is searched for. I have prepared a short video that will show you how to use this tool effectively:

If keywords have search volume, they can bring traffic to your site. It’s your job to do proper SEO so that your site can rank as highly as possible.

Major SEO Ranking Factors

Once you have a keyword phrase (or keyword phrases) that can bring traffic, you will want Google to rank your site well for that keyword. That means you need to learn what Google wants to see and then give it to them. There are a lot of different factors that you need to learn and some are more important than others. It’s widely believed that these are the most important 10 factors that Google wants to see:

1. Keyword use in title tag
2. Anchor text of inbound links
3. Global link popularity of the site
4. Age of the site
5. Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
6. Topical relevance of inbound links to site
7. Link popularity of site in topical community
8. Keyword use in body text
9. Global link popularity of linking sites
10. Topical relationship of linking pages

SEO is highly debatable, but this information is taken from 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization and published in a study by SEOmoz. I also agree personally that these are very strong factors that can not be discounted. That said, the terminology is brutal so I want to explain each of these factors and put them in context.

Before we start, lets get one thing straight. You aren’t going to learn to use SEO to create traffic in one day. There is no easy button which brings traffic to your website that quickly. The process of applying SEO techniques to your website is an ongoing process, since the rules of the game are always changing. You’re going to have to understand the techniques, apply them, then test, test and test more.

In order to create traffic with SEO, you will need to learn the basic concepts. Each year the concepts will change so I will not cover any topics that aren’t important anymore. In addition, I will try and update this page everytime I location new information that I feel is valuable to my readers.

Onsite Optimization

• Optimizing HTML Titles
• Optimizing Page Content
• Optimized Tagging
• Optimized Linking Within Sit

Offsite Optimization

• Basic Overview Of Offsite SEO
• White Hat Link Building
• Grey Hat Link Building
• Black Hat Link Building (not recommended)

Most people I have met focus on the on-page stuff and honestly, that doesn’t do a whole lot for you. You can tweak and test your on-page optimization all year and you’ll never see much improvement.

Google puts a lot more emphasis on the links pointing to a page than they do on the content that appears on the page. Which make sense because Google search is not a person, its a computer. A computer determines how popular your website is, not real people. With that in mind, you should make sure you are targeting your website not only to your readers, but also to a machine. Because technically speaking, a worthless page with links pointing at it is more likely to rank well than a great page with no links pointing at it. That said, pages with quality content usually attract links so the great pages usually have more links than worthless pages and Google operates on this principle.

Onsite Optimization

This section is typically the easiest to understand. Follow this simple walk-through and you can get through your onsite SEO in no time. These steps should be taken for each page on your website.

• Exact Match Domain Names. There’s no doubt that redracecars.com would be a lot easier to rank for ‘red race cars’ than courtcars.com would be. There is an exact match bonus in place for domains that match the keyword that’s searched for. Like anything else, this ranking factor can be overcome by having better scores in other areas.
• Keyword use in title tag. The keyword you want to rank for needs to be in the HTML title tag of the page you’re trying to rank for. The page can potentially rank fine if the keyword is in there by itself and it if contains other words. Either ways, just make sure your keywords are there.
• Keyword Use in Body Text. Place your keyword within the content of your page at least 2-3 times. If you have more than 500 words of content on the page, you can use the keyword four or five or even six times. There is no need to try and calculate the exact number of times your keyword should appear on your page, so don’t even waste your time trying to figure it out. Just write your content so it reads well enough and doesn’t look spammy.
• Placing tags at the end of articles. At the end of each article or post, use your keyword as a tag. If you use WordPress or Blogger, tagging is quite easy. If you use something else, you’ll have to create tags manually. Tags are actually just links with a special piece of code on them. If you have to create them manually, here’s a Tag Generator you can use.
• Internal Link Structure. Edit some other pages of your site and create links that point at the page you’re trying to get to rank well. Use your keyword as anchor text in those links. The more links you point, the better your page will rank.
• Keyword Use in H1 tags. The H1 tag of a page is meant to designate the title of the body text. In the code of the page, the H1 appears as such: <h1>Your H1 Title Goes Here</h1>. Using your keyword in the H1 tags of a page allows Google to see that you’re telling your site’s visitors that this page is about the keyword you want to rank for.
• Keyword Use In URLs. It’s definitely wise to use your keyword phrase in the URL of the page you would like to rank.
• One page per article. You will get the best search results by only posting one post per page unless all your posts are related to the same keywords. If using Adsense then always stick to one post per page.
• Using eywords in phto title and alt tags. If using photos then your keywords should be used in the alt tags.

Onsite SEO isn’t brain surgery. Those are the only concepts you need to know to start bringing in traffic.

Off-site Optimization

For the most part, off-site SEO techniques revolve around the links that point to your site from other webpages. These links back to your site are commonly called backlinks. It’s very much a popularity contest. The pages with the most links will rank the best.

Many times Google will find two or more pages on the same subject. So how does Google know which page has more authority? The examine each page, and the page that has the best links pointing at it, will be chosen by Google as the best.

• Relevance of Inbound Links to Site. There are different factors Google uses to determine which links are better than others, but this isn’t brain surgery either. Links from better sites are better links. Basically, a link from your neighbor’s tree shoe collection blog won’t count for as much as a link from The New York Times would. Additionally, links from related sites will help you more than links from sites that aren’t related to yours.

• Anchor Text of Inbound Links. Anchor text, the text that links are made out of, also affects search rankings significantly. If you get a link that uses the keyword you’re trying to rank for as anchor text, it will make more difference than a link that uses something else as the anchor text. A related anchor will help more than a unrelated anchor.
• Link Popularity of Inbound Links to Site.

Other SEO Ranking Factors

• Rate of Growth in Links. The strongest sites often have the strongest rate of growth in links. This is generally because people like the site better than its competitors.
• Domain Registration Length. Some SEOs believe that there is a negative correlation between one year domain registrations and Google rankings. This ranking factor would definitely be quite small, but could make sense considering that most spammers are going to try to make things as cheap as possible and would therefore only register domains for one year.
• Keyword Use in Bold. It’s widely believed that using your keyword in bold as a positive correlation with Google. This should be taken care of if you use your keyword in H1 tags.
• Thoroughness of Resource. Many SEOs believe that Google uses their understanding of word correlations to alter rankings. For example, this theory would tell us that a good resource on Microsoft should mention Bill Gates.
• Size of Site. Sites with more pages of quality content seem to rank more easily in Google than smaller sites. This correlation makes sense in that a site that has 1,000 pages of content on a subject will often be a better resource than a site that has one page of content on the subject.
• Global Link Popularity of The Site. Global link popularity is the total amount and strength of links pointing at your entire site. If you have a brand new site you probably have weak global link popularity. On the other hand, if you own The New York Times you have fantastic link popularity. As of this morning, The New York Times website has about 39,500,000 links pointing at it.  Yahoo’s website has over 100,000,000 links pointing at it.
• Age of the Site. When I talk to new website owners about this ranking factor they usually tend to get mad. They don’t want it to be true because there’s nothing that they can do to make their site older. Unfortunately for them, Google does use age as a factor in calculating rankings.When you’re working on getting an older site ranked, it’s honestly easier. The age is a definite advantage. That said, you can outrank an older site by beating up on it in other areas. For example, if your new site has much better global link popularity than your older competitor, you can still beat it for rankings.Depending on the nature of your site and business, you may want to consider buying an older site or domain. This can put you at a competitive advantage and can take away the lead weight that comes from working with a brand new site.
• Use at least 300 words of total text on the page. You can of course get a ranking with less textual content. Actually, you can get a ranking with no content at all. However, this will make it much more difficult. If we’re going for optimal pages, they need to have 300+ words of content.

White, Grey and Black Hat Link Building

White Hat - This is the kind of link building Google is 100% ok with. It’s very limiting in what you can do, but it keeps you in the safe zone for what Google wants.

To stay white hat, means you need to make a website and create totally awesome and unique content, that will get you linked automatically (from other websites) and naturally.

By using white hat link building techniques, your site will only get links that it deserves because of the killer content you have put together. Google also says it’s ok to submit your site to online directories. Google has strict rules against linking techniques that can manipulate search rankings. To make sure you stay white hat, ou need to submit your website to directories using your site’s name as the the titles anchor.

Grey Hat – This consists of almost all of the link building techniques SEO experts. Link trading, directory submissions using keywords, article distribution and site interlining all would be considered, grey hat.

Everyone thinks these techniques are 100% acceptable, but they aren’t. Many people people get away with them, but the honest truth is that they are definitely in the grey hat area. Google and other search engines wold prefer to not see any linking techniques that manipulate search engine rankings and these clearly do.

Many SEO’s use grey hat techniques, so you will have to decide what is and isn’t worth the risk for you.

Black Hat – These linking techniques fall way outside the guidelines set forth by Google. This is the website farming, comment spamming and hacking that many black hats participate in, I personally wouldn’t get into anything like this, because unless you’re very advanced, you’ll amost always get banned before you succeed.

But at the same time, there are plenty of  black haters making money. Once you research keywords, there is no doubt you will stumble across a few. But since this is a very bad idea for most people, I’m never going to talk about these methods and would never use any of them myself. Just be aware of your competition and if they’re using them.

Search Engine Optimization Applied

It’s pretty easy to get lost when you try to implement SEO strategies. Obviously, this happens because there are so many different aspects to it. Many people don’t believe that they can ever beat the competition because they have specific disadvantages, i.e. the age of their domain.

In the end, any disadvantage can be overcome by getting better in other areas, specifically in the area of link popularity. If you can’t fix a disadvantage that you have, outdo your competitors in other areas.

The trump card in the search engine optimization world is link popularity. If you can get the most and best sites to link to yours you can almost always override any other ranking factor.