In What is SEO? Part 1 you learned what SEO means and is and you learned what Search Engines are and how they work. Now you will learn more about some basics and techniques that professionals do to optimize a website for the search engines: Keyword/Phrase Research - this step is key in the SEO process and should be first above any other step. First, you need to find the keywords/phrases that you think a person would search for to find your website. Really you are researching keywords that are targeted and relevant to your market. Next you will research the traffic volume or popularity of the keywords/phrases, this is essential because it would be pointless to optimize your website for a keyword or phrase that gets zero (0) searches. Next you will research the Competition of the keywords or keyphrases that you have chosen. If a keyword/phrase is too competitive you have to analyze whether or not it is worth optimizing. The reason for this is simple, if you have chosen the keyword "Real Estate" then you have a huge task ahead of you. We are not saying that you can't get ranked on the first page of the major search engines for this keyword but you have to decide if it is worth the time and effort. Choose keywords/phrases that are unique and yet are attainable. Url/Domain Name Optimization - Once you have found your main keyword you are going to focus on the next step, which is to decide what your Domain name is going to be. You might ask, "What is a Domain Name?" A Domain Name is the name that a person would type into a web-browser to visit your website e.g. www.yourdomainnamehere.com. To optimize your Domain Name you will want to find something that is short, targeted to your market, explains your site, and uses the main keyword you have chosen through your Keyword Research. So for example if your keyword was "Real Estate" then you would want to use those keywords in your domain name. Some may argue that using the keywords in your domain name is to general and doesn't brand your company. This is for you to decide, but it is proven at least for now that the Search Engines use the domain name text in their algorithms of how they see your site's relevancy to the search criteria. Note: The domain name you choose needs to be available to purchase. On-Page Optimization - another important step of optimizing your website is optimizing the web pages that the user and the spiders see. Now this is the trickiest part of SEO because you want to optimize your site for the Search Engine Spiders but you also want to optimize your site for your users/visitors. The best rule of thumb is to lean toward optimizing your site for the users first because more and more the search engines are looking at your site as if a human was, this is called Latent Semantic Indexing, optimize as natural as possible. So on-page optimization uses the following techniques: * Content Optimization * Keyword Placement (Frequency, Density, Proximity, etc.) * Title Tag Optimization * Meta Tag Optimization * Spider/Robot Tag Optimization * Image Alt Optimization * Internal Link Structure * 301 Redirects * Robot.txt Creation * Broken Links & Page Optimization * Site Mapping * Avoiding Specific Design Optimization Issues (Graphic, Flash, Dynamic, Frameset, and Javascript only Sites) Off-Page Optimization - As important as any of the other steps of SEO, Off-page optimization is key to your success. Think of it this way the search engines want to see how popular your website is to the online world. This strategy of off-page optimization is where you optimize your website off the pages of your site. Link Building is most important to the off-page optimization process. Link Building is where you get a link back to your website on someone else's site. The important step is to have your keyword within the anchor text of the link not just simply putting www.mydomainname.com as the link text. Getting links from Authority Sites (high traffic and highly ranked sites) is also very important again letting the search engines know that your site is popular. Most importantly with link building is getting links from sites that are relevant to your website and your keywords/phrases, if you for example get 100 links from Health Care websites and your Keyword is targeted toward "Real Estate" then the search engines won't think you are really that popular or relevant to the criteria of "Real Estate". Note: Getting links from irrelevant sites is not bad just not going to optimize your off-page process. Here are some of the important items of off-page optimization: * Link Building (One Way and Reciprocal Links) * Link Baiting (Luring others to want to link to your website) * Article Submissions (Keyword rich content with links back to your website submitted to Article Directories) * Press Release Submission (Optimized content with keywords & links, and also a great Link Baiting opportunity) * Directory Submissions * Search Engine Submission (Submitting your website to the search engines saying, "Spiders come look at my site, I have food for you.") * Sitemap Submissions Monitoring Search Engine Rankings (Analytics) - One important skill in SEO is measuring the results of applying some of the basic SEO techniques that we have mentioned above. To be a successful Search Engine Optimization professional you must Test, Test, and Test again. Patience is another quality that someone doing SEO must possess. You need to realize that you will not see results in one (1) or two (2) days actually you must be prepared to begin waiting and it could take time to see results maybe for two (2) to even (6) months. A quick way to see if you website is even seen (indexed) by the search engines is by typing site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com into the search engine, if your site is indexed in the search engine you will see results in the query if not you will see "Your search - site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com - did not match any documents". The manual way to monitor your rankings is simply typing in your keyword/phrase you are trying to rank for and search through the search engine results until you find your website. There are tools that you can use to monitor your rankings. Web analytics measures your online activity such as how much traffic your website is receiving, from where, and also measuring conversion. The most famous and may we add free Web analytic software is Google Analytics. This free web analytics tool is very robust giving you the geographic, trends, exit pages, and referrers of where your traffic is coming from and leaving from. Now we hope you have learned some key terms, techniques, and basics of what Search Engine Optimization is and how it affects your business and even your life. So "What is SEO?" well have given you some of the very basics above in this article but we realize that there is much much more to SEO than just these things and you must keep up on all the changes and updates of the Search Engines.
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