Perhaps one of the more misunderstood facets of search engine optimization is the fact that it isn’t completing one action, it is a combination of many completed actions. When all of our efforts come together, and complement each other, you have a classic!

Getting top listings doesn’t come by accident. If you know SEO techniques you should try to build them into your site as you build it. That is probably not your situation and you have a site built by someone else and it needs to be optimized. I suggest that your focus your first efforts on optimization after you have a completed site.

I have seen many people make the mistake of jumping into SEO without having the knowledge to really make the correct changes to their site. These people inevitably load their pages with keywords and do a lot of things that are just going to hurt your ranking, or the ability of your site to ever be ranked.

Search engines are looking for “natural” appearance. Not visually, but to them, as spiders and robots. They may expect to see a keyword four, five or six times on any given page, but definitely not 50 times. If you investigate sites that rank in the top five positions you may see a trend where the sites don’t appear to be optimized. One huge part of optimization is developing inbounds links and utilizing good keywords to help and define your site as exactly that … your important keywords.

Optimization is something that really needs to be studied, and learned about. You cannot just jump in and all of the sudden know how to optimize a website. It is a lot of common sense, yes indeed, but it is certain knowledge of exactly what to do that will make all of the difference to the final product, and your rankings on the search engines.

Let’s face it, without listings “above the fold”, (visible without scrolling) on the first page at Google, you are just not going to get many visitors. You need to get your site into these top positions in order to make any real advancement in your online marketing.

Concentrate on getting your optimization right for the major engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo! This is where 99% of your traffic is going to come from. They each have differing algorithms, but good solid techniques will help you win on all three of these giants.

The main items that you will want to work on to get optimized are the title tag, the meta description tag, the meta keywords tag, code attributes like alt=, title=, summary=, H1 and H2 tags, and possibly the H3 tag, keyword density, navigation and/or ease of navigation and anchor text and internal linking are all among the main things to work on for on-site optimization.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Internet and Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.