Sunday, February 15, 2009

A Quick Introduction To Search Engine Optimisation Seo

Writen by Peter Smith

SEO is currently a buzz word across the Internet but many normal people do not know what it is let alone how to do it. This is the massively growing trend of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. SEO essentially is a way of altering websites in order to appear higher on a search engines for specific key words or key phrases. Now the theory behind this is relatively simple and the following list will cover the basics of how to achieve a higher ranking page (these basics follow white hat principles).

1. Chose one to three key phrases per webpage you create. Key phrases can be researched using Wordtracker or Overture in order to find the optimum key phrase for you. These 2 resources will basically help you find a phrase that hundreds or thousands of people search for, rather than just a few dozen if you choose the keyword off the top of your head.

2. When you have defined your key phrase create a relevant title for your webpage, and make sure your keyword/phrase is in it.

3. Write some content based around your key phrase, making sure you repeat your key phrase within the content. It is good practise to have between 6 – 12% of your content being the key phrase; however you need to try and make the content as readable as possible.

4. Create valid HTML or XHTML for your page and any ALT attributes used in images that are used should be specific to the image itself. If the image is relevant to your key phrase make sure you try and use the key phrase in the explanation. Images that have no meaning add the Alt attribute but set it to "".

5. Add your keywords into the Meta keywords and also create a description about the page and include the keywords within the description. Now these 2 Meta tags are not taken into consideration by many Search Engines now-a-days but it is generally good practice to have them in place.

6. Any links within your document make sure you use relevant text as the link for example instead of having "Learn about SEO click here" with click here as the link just use "Learn about SEO" and have the sentence as the link. This is known as anchor text.

Steps 1-6 cover the on page optimisation briefly. A webmaster can then look into building up their link popularity. This is where web pages link back to your page, and arguably is one of the more important parts of SEO. When a search engine spider visits your page it will look at how many other pages link to your page, it will also look at them pages and see what the pages are about. The more pages linking to your site then the more likely the search engine will think your webpage is important. However it is not quite so simple as that, the Search Engine will also look at the site that has linked to your page and if that page is based on the subject you have written about it will regard the link as more useful to lets say a poker site linking to a cricket site.

Finally the SE will also look at how well the linking page is rated itself if no one has linked to the linking page then it will not be classed as that important so the weight of the link will not be that great to your site. However let's say apple.com linked to the linking page along with hundreds of other sites and the page was based on the same subject as yours then the link would be very valuable indeed. Now if we look at Google they have a way of ranking how important pages are, called Page Rank (PR) the higher the PR the more important the site.

• 1 Way linking, this is the best form of linking and normally mean the content on your site is a useful resource or just generally interesting to the linking website and they have decided to link to you.

• 2 way linking. This is the more common way for SEO experts to get links; they literally swap links with websites.

• 3 way linking. This is less common but is an attempt to make search engines think your website has 1 way links not 2 way links. For example Site A will link to Site B, then Site B will link to Site C and finally Site C will link back to Site A.

If these strategies are put in place then a website will be well on the way to achieving better results in the search engines. Unfortunately because websites can be optimised to appear higher in search engines it has tempted a lot of people to find devious ways to improve a sites ranking in search engines.

If you are serious about getting the best SEO for your site why not hire a dedicated company to perform White Hat SEO then look no further than Blue Echo

I currently work for Blue Echo UK Ltd as the online promotions manager.

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