SEO | Search Engine Optimization Basics

Making money building niche content sites online relies on traffic. No traffic means no income. Search engine optimization, SEO is the process of tailoring your content, web design, and interaction with your niche’s community to best position yourself to direct natural search engine traffic to your site.

Search Engine Optimization is a career, a field of study, a huge topic. You could spend years studying it and still have a thing or two to learn. SEO is also one of those nice processes where knowing just a little takes you a long way. Knowing a lot is great and will give you that extra edge but knowing just the basics of SEO will give you the bulk of the benefit.

Keywords

Keywords in search engine optimization are the words or phrases people use to search for information via search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Live Search. Those three by the way comprise the lion’s share of all searches on the internet.

Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords is a buzz word in niche content SEO Web Design circles. What are long tail keywords and why are they important. If you take a niche like SEO. The phrases SEO and Search Engine Optimization will have a huge number of searches associated with them. However, people looking for information related to SEO will use terms like “how to improve serp rank”, “Improve Search Engine Rank”, “Best Serp Results”, and hundreds more such terms. Each of these less frequently used terms will only compose a small percent of the over all searches conducted but added together this long tail of the curve comprises half or more of all the searches related to SEO. If you optimize for these lesser used terms you are likely optimizing your pages for keywords that are less often optimized by other webmasters. Therefore it is easier to rank well for these terms. So, the more competitive your niche the more you want to focus on these long tail keywords.

The first step in creating search engine optimized pages is discovering keywords related to your topic that searchers are actually using. On first blush you may feel you know these already. Keyword research will very likely prove you wrong. The time and effort required for keyword research is well worth the effort. You need to know the words searches really use. Otherwise all your optimization techniques and efforts will be useless. I can not stress this enough. Take the time to do the research on your niche. Even if you’ve already published content, do the research. Go back and optimize your existing content.

There are a number of free sites you can use to do your research. The truth is none of them will easily give you all the information you need. They are good for taking a look at a new niche you are considering getting into. Once you decided to go for a particular niche it is more than worth your money to purchase access to WordTracker. You can buy access for a week for about $30. If you have more than one niche to research, a week is plenty of time to cover a few. Without WordTracker you will spend considerably more time and never get as much info as you need.

The following are useful articles to guide you in your research.

Here are some useful free tools for keyword research:

Site optimization can be devided into two broad categories.

On page optimization

On Page optimization is the process of optimizing both the content of your pages and the design of your pages to be search engine friendly. To optimize your content follow these steps.

Web Content Optimization

  1. Choose 2-3 keyword phrases from your keyword research to optimize. Choose 1-2 with high search frequency. Choose 1-2 with some frequency and a low number of competing pages (high KEI).
  2. Place one or more of your keywords in the url of your page.
  3. Place one or more of your keywords in the Title of your page.
  4. Throughout the content of your page use your keywords in <h> tags.
  5. Throughout the content of your page bold, italicize or underline your keywords.
  6. Throughout the content of your page use your keywords in bulleted or numbered lists.
  7. Insure that one or more of your keywords is present in the first sentence of your page.
  8. Insure that one or more of your keywords is present in the last sentence or two of your page.

Web Design Optimization

  1. Use css and divs to layout your page instead of tables. Tables flood the page with markup text making your actual content less prominent in the eyes of the search engines.
  2. Design your page so that the source code for the page has your content placed near the top not the bottom. As much as possible have the markup code follow the content.
  3. Use white space techniques, bullets, ordered list, header tags all filled with keywords.
  4. Don’t display textual content as images or flash. They are ignored by the search engines.
  5. Don’t use frames.
  6. Minimize java script. Search engines don’t read it.
  7. Don’t require visitors to accept a cookie.
    Focus your efforts on making your content keyword rich. Search engines pay little or no attention to meta data tags (id <META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”a bunch of keywords”> ). Don’t waste energy.

Off page optimization

Off page optimization is the process of building links from other sites to your pages. Search engines rank the importance of a page, page rank, based on the number of pages across the internet that link to it and the importance of those pages. In other words, getting a link from www.msn.com to one of your pages will rank you better than one from www.joe-somebodys-homepage.biz.

It is also important to note that pages containing keywords relevant to your content linking to your page rank you better than links from irrelevant pages.

How to you build links to your pages. The hurdle here is that you don’t control the pages you want links to be placed on. You have to convince someone else to add links to their pages.

  • Become active in your niche’s community. Visit blogs and discussion boards relevant to your content. Whenever possible post your own comments on these sites. Sign your comments with a link to one of your pages. Be sure you have something to say. If you are obviously commenting only to get your link, you may get tagged as a spammer.
  • Contact webmasters of the sites you would like links from directly. Ask them politely to link to one of your pages. They might do it. They are more likely to do it if you have content that is original and useful to their visitors.
  • Contact any friend or family member you know who has a site or mypage page. Ask them for links too. Every link helps.

DON’Ts

This is simple really. Do the above and you will by definition have avoided most the “don’ts”. The one big “don’t” you must keep in mind is to avoid any technique considered to be black hat SEO (tricky Search Engine Optimization). How do you know when it is black hat SEO. If you at any time feel you are doing something or someone working for you  is doing something to fool the search engines vs doing things to make the search engine’s job easier, assume it is a black hat technique. Why avoid black hat techniques. The search engine’s already know most of them and will penalize you for using them or perhaps even wipe your url from their index completely. If you find a successful as yet unknown black hat technique it will eventually be known and hurt you badly at that point. It’s best to play fair but compete hard.

If you want to go beyond the basics Search Engine Optimization For Dummies is an excellent next step.

October 11th, 2007 - Posted in How To Make Money - Niche Content Sites | | 1 Comments