Get started on the optimization of your website for top Google placement

Get Started

The first step to getting started with your search-engine optimization campaign is to select a topic. If you already have a Web site covering a topic that you are satisfied with, then you may want to skip this step. However, keep in mind that you need to set realistic expectations based on your chosen topic. Increasing your Web site rankings for competitive topics is much more difficult than increasing rankings for less competitive topics.

To get the most from your SEO efforts, you must carefully consider your target audience. Your target audience includes the specific people you are trying to put your Website in front of. Understanding who your target audience is and what they are searching for can greatly increase the effectiveness of a search-engine-optimization campaign.

Prior to beginning your SEO efforts, you should set goals, including how much money you want to dedicate to your efforts. If you are going to conduct SEO internally you need to set a budget only around the tools you need and the amount of money you must allocate to paying your internalSEO team. If you intend to outsource your SEO, you should set aside a minimum of $3,000 to $5,000 monthly for a dedicated SEO professional. You could of course simply forego the cost and go for a book like SEO Help: 20 steps to get our website to Google’s Get your website to Google's #1 page which has helped thousands of webmasters successfully optimize their websites.

Putting together an internal team of people to help with your SEO requires you to select one or more individuals with varying proficiency in HTML writing, knowledge of CSS, data analysis, graphical design, server administration, copywriting, link building, and blogging. Although the scope of your project dictates how many people you need to fill out your team, you can always consider outsourcing one or more components of the job.

Although writing large amounts of original content may seem like a daunting task there are countless professional copywriters that can provide you with well-written content at a reasonable price. Moreover, there are online services such as Elance that allow you to hire copywriters and other service providers through an auction system. The auction system allows you to post your work so that multiple service providers compete for the job. You have the option of comparing multiple vendors and ultimately choosing one or more based on skill level and past performance within the Elance network.

One of the best places to keep up to date with what is happening in the search-engine marketing industry is to read blogs and other online news sources. Blogs such as SearchEngineLand.com, seroundtable.com, and SEOmoz.com provide current perspectives and tips, and news Web sites including DMNews.com, ClickZ.com, and WebProNews.com provide breaking news and commentary on search-engine marketing.

Keyword Generation

Effective keyword generation is one of the most critical elements of successful search-engine optimization. All keywords are not created equal; some keywords are easier to rank for than others, and some keywords tend to be almost impossible to rank for. Broad or general keywords tend to be highly competitive and therefore should represent only a small portion of your overall SEO efforts. Specific keywords, which include those keywords that describe your specific product or service and are more than three keywords in length, are less competitive and therefore should make up the bulk of your keyword generation efforts.

For example, if you own an e-commerce Web site you stand a better chance of ranking within the top search results for product-level keywords than you do for broad keywords that generally describe your business. Although broad keywords tend to generate higher levels of search volume, product level terms can generate significant search volume and tend to convert at higher rates than broad terms.

There are numerous useful keyword generation tools that can help you discover effective keywords for your Web site. Keyword generation tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, and Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool allow you to carefully research, analyze, and filter potential keywords. It is not enough to just generate massive lists ofkeywords. Instead, your keyword lists should represent a cross section of broad and specific terms that your Web site stands a legitimate chance of ranking for. Because keyword generation is so critical to your SEO success, consider making a modest financial investment by purchasing subscriptions to tools such as Keyword Discovery, Rapid Keyword, and Wordtracker even though Google, Yahoo, and other companies offer tools for free.

Keep in mind that despite the fact that keyword generation tools can quickly generate thousands upon thousands of keywords, each page of your Web site should be search-engine optimized for only one or two keywords. Therefore, focus less on generating massive lists of keywords and more on generating keyword lists that directly relate to your Web site and give you the best shot at ranking well on search engines.

One of the most effective ways to generate target keywords beyond basic keyword generation is through competitive research. Readily available competitive research tools such as Seodigger, GoogSpy, Compete.com, and KeyCompete provide various data about your competition, including what keywords your competitors rank for in the organic search results, as well as what keywords your competitors are using on pay-per-click search engines such as Google. Armed with competitive research information, you can compare your success to your competition and use the information to devise a plan of attack to improve your own ranking within the organic and paid search results.

Create Pages

For the purposes of search-engine optimization, keep in mind that search engines do not actually rank Web sites; instead, search engines rank individual Web pages. Therefore, in order to succeed with SEO each and every page of your Web site must be optimized for search-engine purposes. The most important element of each of your Web pages is substantial unique content. However, there are numerous other important structural and technological factors that you can optimize on your Web pages to ensure that you position yourself to rank well within the search-engine results.

For example, optimizing technical on-site Web page factors such as adding correct file names, title tags, meta description tags, meta keyword tags, and meta robots tags is crucial to making sure the search-engine spiders can determine the relevance of your Web site. Besides your domain name, the first things search engines discover when spidering through the pages of your Web site are your file names. Every single page of your Web site resides in a different file. By titling your pages with search-engine

optimization in mind, you have a powerful opportunity to establish relevance to a certain topic or keyword.

Each page of your Web site should contain a unique title tag that includes the target keywords you want to rank for. Search engines place great importance on the text contained within your title tag and use it as a primary indicator of what your Web page is about. Therefore, your title tag should include your target keywords and also provide a concise statement summarizing what your Web page is about.

Although search engines rarely use description and keyword tags for ranking purposes, each page of your Web site should include unique description and keyword tags. Description tags can be especially important because search engines often use them as the display text shown when a search query triggers your Web page. Therefore, your description tag should include a call-to-action marketing message so that your listing stands out among other listings and gets clicked.

Optimizing your content with header tags and other text modifiers allows you to stress the main ideas and topics that your content covers. Header tags are HTML tags used to apply significance to keywords or phrases within a Web page. Placing a selection of text within a header tag tells the search-engine spiders that the text is of a certain level of importance. Using text modifiers, you can emphasize certain blocks of text by bolding, italicizing, or underlining.

Taking care to optimize Web page images is important for those Web browsers that do not support images, and because search-engine spiders are unable to accurately read the content of an image, doing so presents an extra opportunity to add keyword-rich content to your page. Links provide the pathways that search-engine spiders need to find your Web pages. Creating links with search-engine optimization in mind is necessary for optimal results.

Throughout the process of creating Web pages you should try to adhere to the standards set forth by the W3 Consortium, which works to create standards in Web design and development that ensure Internet-wide compatibility.

Basic Web Site Structure

A well-optimized Web site design and structure helps to improve the overall performance of your Web site, making it easier for users to navigate and for search engines to find and index all of your content. You want to balance your Web site design between the needs of your users and the needs of the search engines. To be successful, your Web site should not only provide a superior user experience, but also include an optimal structure so that search engines index your content.

One way to ensure that search engines find all of your content is by submitting a sitemap. Think of your sitemap as an outline of your entire Web site. A sitemap displays the inner framework and organization of your Web site’s structure to the search engines. A sitemap should reflect the entire navigational structure of your Web site so that search-engine spiders can find and index all of your content. As you add new content to your Web site, you should submit your sitemap to the search engines on a regular basis, every 24 hours or so.

To establish trust and credibility in the eyes of your visitors and search engines, your Web site should include both a company information and privacy page. A company information page helps to strengthen your reputation in the eyes of both your Web site visitors and the search engines. Adding a company information page helps build trust with your visitors by explaining who you are and where you come from by providing company biographies, history, and staff photos.

In addition to a company information page, your Web site should also contain a page explaining your privacy policy. A privacy policy page helps to establish trust by declaring that you are committed to protecting the privacy of your visitors’ personal information. Try to keep your privacy policy simple and make it easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to find on your Web site. You should consider adding a link to your privacy policy next to a link to your company information page. This way, your visitors can see that you are a trustworthy and legitimate entity.

Advanced Web Site Structuring

Once you have the basic structure of your Web site in place, you can implement several additional advanced structural considerations to optimize your site for search-engine purposes. For example, beyond setting up your Web site so that it is indexed, you may want to instruct the search engines not to index a particular page. A robots.txt file allows you to tell the spiders what they may and may not do when they arrive at your domain. Robots.txt files also provide you a means to prevent both potential copyright infringements and search-engine spiders from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth on your server.

One primary example of advanced Web site structuring includes the use of the nofollowattribute. The nofollow attribute instructs search-engine spiders that they should not follow a particular link or view that link as anything of significance when determining ranking. Because search engines count links from your Web site to another Web site as a vote for search-engine ranking purposes, you can add nofollowif you do not want the search-engine spider to credit the link.

A second advanced Web site structural consideration is the way you structure your URLs. URLs must be structured so that they are easily spidered and organized and create a user-friendly Web site navigation system. For example, search engines as well as people prefer URLs that are simple and that include the keywords describing the page within the URL string.

A third structural consideration is the use of an .htaccess file. An .htaccess file is the Apache Web server’s configuration file. It is a straightforward yet powerful text file that can accomplish a wide variety of functions that allow you to protect your Web site from content-stealing robots. Moreover, .htaccess is useful in that it allows you to dynamically rewrite poorly formed URLs that shopping cart or blog software generate.

Other advanced Web site structural considerations include using mod_rewrite to rewrite URLs, redirecting non-www traffic to your www domain, and using 301 redirects whenever you change or redesign your Web site. Each advanced structuring technique provides you with procedures to ensure that search engines recognize your Web site and that each of your Web pages are correctly indexed.

Content Creation

Creating well-written, original content is absolutely critical to your long-term search-engine-optimization success. Content is what visitors use to determine value and one of the primary factors that search engines use to rank your Web site. Whether your Web site ends up on the first page or the one-hundredth page of Google largely depends on the quality and relevance of your content.

Although you should keep SEO principles in mind when you create content, the key to building long-term ranking on search engines is to write content for people, not search engines. Content that is original and naturally flowing provides your readers with a positive, enjoyable user experience and greatly improves your chances of top search-engine rankings. Avoid writing content solely for search engine-optimization purposes and you can greatly increase your likelihood of long-term SEO success.

When you write content, you must avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs when your Web site contains content that already exists on the World Wide Web. Duplicate content issues can have a detrimental effect on your SEO success and should be avoided at all costs. Writing original content is the most obvious way to avoid duplicate content. If you feel that you do not have the time to build large amounts of unique content, you can employ tools on your Web site, such as user reviews, that allow for user-generated content. User-generated content allows your content to remain fresh, which is one of the factors search engines use to rank one Web site over another with similar authority.

Writing original content and adding user-generated content does not entirely protect you from duplicate content issues. You must protect yourself from others stealing your content because Google cannot algorithmically detect who owns content. Fortunately, tools such as Copyscape are available that help you avoid and prevent duplicate content issues.

Although you should write content for people and not search engines, you should also use proper keyword density throughout each page of your Web site. First, you want to optimize each page of your Web site for no more than one or two target keywords, while at the same time making sure that you do not inadvertently repeat non-target keywords. By using available tools to maximize optimal keyword density, you can incorporate a substantial number of target keywords throughout your content without compromising the naturally flowing aesthetics of the writing.

You should keep in mind a few important content creation principles as you build your Web site. First, search-engine algorithms cannot read text that is included in images. Therefore, always include important text and target keywords that appear in images in text form. You can still use images, but search engines cannot read the text contained within them. Second, when drafting your content you can use a powerful content-creation principal called latent semantic content, which involves using keywords very similar to your target keywords to enhance the theme and relevance of your page. For example, if your target keyword is “Old Spice,” you can also use words like “deodorant” and “cologne” to enhance the thematic relatedness and relevancy of your page for your target keyword “Old Spice.”

For more information on SEO Help and how it can help you optimize your own website see any of the links below:


http://www.amazon.com/SEO-Help-Optimization-website-Googles/dp/1844819965
http://www.webdirectstudio.com/books-for-online-business-success
http://www.helpmyseo.com/seo-blog/182-seo-help-book-on-sale-in-the-netherlands-and-amazons-kindle-store.html
http://www.canadianwebdirectory.com/seo-help-book-gets-your-website-to-the-first-page-of-google/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/SEO-Help-to-get-your-website-on-the-first-page-of-Google/279344396254
http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage/?act=68635240#!/pages/SEO-Help-to-get-your-website-on-the-first-page-of-Google/279344396254
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Seo-Help/David-Amerland/e/9781844819966
http://www.amazon.co.uk/SEO-Help-Steps-Website-Googles/dp/1844819965
http://internetmarketingedu.com/seo-help-20-search-engine-optimization-steps-to-get-your-website-to-googles-1-page/
http://www.helpmyseo.com/seo-help-the-book.html
http://www.squidoo.com/seothatmakessense
http://www.imri.in/books/seo-help-20-seo-steps-get-your-website-google-1-page-david-amerland
http://www.toolsntricks.com/seo-help-20-search-engine-optimization-steps-to-get-your-website-to-googles-1-page
http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/david+amerland/seo+help/7449332/
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2792100/seo_help_20_steps_to_take_your_website.html?cat=3