How To SEO Your Website

by John Dow

Anyone can learn how to SEO their web pages to get more targeted search engine traffic. There are no big secrets like many people would like you to believe. All of the search engines provide some basic information and guidelines to follow to be properly indexed under your subject matter.

As the Internet has matured over the last 4-5 years, so have the search engines methods on indexing and ranking your web site pages. That's one thing many new website owners misunderstand, each web page stands on it's own when being reviewed. The website as a whole is not ranked or indexed, it's the web pages in the website.

Learning how to SEO a web page is based on how to provide the information to the visiting search engine spiders who review every web page. These software bots constantly roam the web and record information to index the subject matter of each web page. The easier you make it for the search engine spiders to find critical information, the more accurately you will be displayed on specific search terms.

SEO can be divided into two categories, on-page and off-page. Each one of these categories are used in different ways to index and rank your web pages according to some basic criteria. The search engines provide guidelines but refuse to give exact details since the less than honest individuals would use this information to cheat.

The on-page category has several important common areas that they examine to index and rank within that index for search terms the user submits. One problem the search engines and the website owners have in common is that anyone who inputs a term to search on can be to general to provide exact results. If you do a search on a one word term like money, you will get billions (yes that is correct) of website listings with money mentioned.

So the more specific search term, the better it is for all concerned. And there is nothing anyone can do about the searcher's lack of skill in submitting the search terms. But it does give you a hot tip that the better you can provide information to the search engines, the better search results you'll be listed under.

OK, back to the on-page factors. Here's a quick list of items to be sure to include on each web page:

• Title: Use appropriate keyword terms for your title that match the content.
• Meta Tags: The description should be specific and remember it is displayed on the search engine results. Keywords was at one time important but not so much these days. There are some more meta tags that you can use to re-direct, keep page from being indexed, or other purposes.
• The content should be of value to the keywords or phrases you chose to be listed under. Always make sure that you organize and clearly state important information. Don't try to cover too many aspects on one web page. Use links to provide additional information.
• Internal linking is important since it helps the user and the search engine spiders navigate your website. Links should be in meaningful and descriptive anchor text (use refrigerator parts rather than just parts) and not graphics. Standard links should be on every web page.

The off-page factors are basically links from other websites or even advertising in other media like newspapers, television, billboards, etc. For our purposes here, we'll stay to links from other websites.

The most important factor about offsite links is to use the same anchor text method mentioned in internal linking. Try to always use the display text to describe the web page being linked to that the user and the search engines will understand.

• Anchor text link example: Bass Fishing Lures
• Regular website link example: www.joeslures.com

Linking from websites that have similar content whenever possible is a search engine favorite since it reinforces your web page content. Google uses a pagerank to show the importance or authority to a particular web page, the value assigned is between 1 and 10, 10 being the best. This is a very debated subject but most agree that links from high pagerank web pages get more value.

Website Links: You can get these in any number of ways. You can exchange links, buy advertising space on other websites, make comments on forums and blogs that have your  link in your signature. You can give away software or some website tool that displays your link.

These are the basics on how to SEO any web page. Each area does have some depth in additional information but if you just follow these basics you can do quite well. There are other articles in our featured area (link is below) that can give you more details.