SEO 101 – BASIC TIPS FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMZATION

Just because you have created an incredible web site doesn’t mean that everyone will find out about it. The “build it and they will come” strategy does not apply in this situation. You need to get people to your site. There are several different ways to accomplish this:

• Place ads in every newspaper in America. This would be ridiculously expensive and complicated.
• Do TV Commercials. Run a 30 second ad on the Super Bowl (yeah, right!)
• Do radio ads on every station in America…

You get the point. One of the most cost effective methods of getting yoru web site out to the public is through targeted search engine optimization. SEO is where you optimize your web site for the different search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. This article is to serve as a basic overview of things to consider to make yoru site more search engine friendly”

• Make sure that each page has different Meta Tags, especially the Title tags.
• Each page should have unique and interesting content. Not just for the search engines but for your web site visitors.
• Your web site should contain a good internal linking structure.
• You should have high quality external links coming in to your site.
• Your site should have valid code throughout.
• Each page should contain some of you main Meta Tags in it. Put some in bold, italic and in H1 tags. Not too much, not too little. You don’t want to “spam” the search engines with too much.
• Make sure you only do ethical search engine optimization. “Black hat seo” might work for a short while but you risk the chance of having your site banned and blacklisted.

This is a good starting point to help get your site more search engine friendly. One of the main things to remember when performing SEO is to do it responsibly, to employ ethical SEO and to remember that your end users are people and not search engine spiders. What is the point of getting people to your site from the search engines and when they finally get to your sit an al lthey are greeted with is large H1 tags and content that makes no sense? So, when you build it, optimize it and they might come.