August 27, 2007

How To Work Your Way To The Top

Step 1: SEO Basics
Search Engines provide a platform for internet browsers to search the internet and find what they're looking for. Their success rests on returning to a user relevant websites for every keyword or keyword phrase that they enter.

Step 2: Your SEO Strategy
A successful search engine optimization strategy revolves around four things: Planning, Analysis, Implementation and Monitoring.

Step 3: Choosing Your Keywords
The first part of your search engine optimization campaign is to research which keywords you want your website to appear under. To get this wrong is a disaster and will undermine the rest of your search engine optimization strategy. If you take the time to get it right your actual optimization will fall into place very easily.

Step 4: Competitor Analysis
The purpose of this lesson is to grasp what our competitors have done in their optimization campaign to achieve the position they are in and better it!.

Step 5: Using SEO Software
Search Engine Optimization Software can't do everything but it can do a lot of things. The internet's most powerful search engine optimization software is SEO Elite V3.2 and what it does ferret out what your competitors are doing to get higher search engine listings than you.

Step 6: Onpage Optimization
The aim of search engine optmization is to tell the search engines what you are relevant to - which search terms you should rank highly for. As I mentioned in Step 2 - this ongoing process is a mixture of onpage and offpage optimization. First we focus on onpage optimization.

Step 7: Title Tag
The title tag is the first part of your page the search engine reads. It needs to define what the content of your page is so the search engines know what they have found. Your title tag needs to contain the primary keywords you are targeting and shouldn't be cluttered with useless words which have no value (such as and).

Step 8: Meta Tags
The second part of your page the search engine reads are your Meta Tags. There are many different Meta Tags which can be used to provide more information about your page.

Step 9: Alt Tags
As search engines cannot read images, Alt Tags are used as a way of giving more information to the search engines about them. Its a great way to include your primary and secondary keywords in another place onpage but you should not get carried away as the over zealous use of keywords may mean you are flagged for keyword-spamming.

Step 10: Header Tags
Header tags are a great way of adding more weight inside your page content to your primary and secondary keywords. There are 6 types of Header Tags H1 - H6 which are different in size and weight.

Step 11: Page Content
This will include everything from your navigation links to the actual paragraphs of written content that make up the main part of any webpage.

Step 12: Offpage Optimization
Offpage Search Engine Optimization
If you imagine that onpage optimization is our personal claim to relvancy. The words on our page and in our title and meta tags say to the search engines - "This is what I'm about".