Learn SEO Basics

This is our first SEO article and hopefully that it will be a great resource for people like you. Let's go over a few basic points of SEO.

Let's take a few minutes to discuss how the search engines view your sites. When the search engines come to crawl your sites the things that they see is text.

When the search engines come they suck up all the text on you site and store it away for future use. They will catalog the words on you site and use that information to decide if a search that someone does in the future would meet their search needs.

Basically they crawl your site and then they index the information on your site. So the primary thing they are looking for is change and content that is relevant to the users search. So if I search for "place here what you offer" the engine would know that the content on your site might meet that search criteria and pull your site as a relevant match.

If you found that people were searching for "Special lollypops from Mars," then you would want to have those keywords "special lollypops mars" through out the content of your webpage.

We suggest you to follow a 6 step procedure:

1. Keyword Research.
this means that instead of deciding what keyword you want to be found for, research needs to be done to determine what keywords people are actually searching for that would be relevant to your industry and expertise.This is why I think it is important for websites to have a niche market because then their websites can be optimized for people searching for that niche market.

2. Crafting content for the Human reader.
Some will try to play the game of Keyword stuffing for the search engines, but our first focus is to craft content for your potential visitors.The visitors to the site are the ones you are trying to target and convert with your content, not the search enginges.

3. Keyword Integration.
In this step we would make sure that the proper keywords are placed in your content. This would include the keyword that was researched along with any other keywords relevant to the keyword researched. There are online tools that you can use to do keyword research. They actually pull from the search engines databases to find out what people are searching for. One thing that you might consider as you research keywords is what are the needs and interests your customers or potential visitors.

http://wordtracker.com/ is one tool that I have used. That's a terrifc resource.
After you get the Keyword set into your page we would ask you to...

4. Get the pages into the search engines. There is a useful tool called Google XML sitemap. With this tool an XML sitemap would be generated for your site and google would benotified each time your site is updated. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Yahoo! also supports XML sitemaps. Along with getting your site out to these broad search engines it would be best to getyour site out into what is referred to as vertical search engines. This would include search engines that are industry specific.

5. Monitor the progress of your pages through Analytics. This is an important step so that you will know who is visiting your page and where are they coming to your site from, how long are they staying on your site, etc. Google analytics is a free enhancement that you can add to your website.
Finally we recommend that you....

6. Work in Ranges of pages. This means that you work on 5-10 pages at a time in your site with related keywords. It is not enough to just optimize one page of your site but it it best to work with a cluster of pages.

Hope this helps. Thanks for reading.