How to Take All the Hassle Out of SEO

SEO is no longer a secret. The goal is to get your sites to rank high in the various major search engines so that you can traffic month after month - free traffic. If done correctly, it can lead to a very lucrative Internet business. Since SEO has been around for years, there are lots of readily available information out there on the Internet on how to optimize your site for the search engines. It'll take much more than a single article to cover everything about SEO, so we'll just focus on the important areas.

Generally speaking, SEO consists of two major areas - internal page factors, and external page factors. External page factors basically mean links from external sites. That means how other people link to your site will influence your rankings on the search engines. So everybody who is into SEO are busy building links to their sites. There are several methods on how to do this, but this article is not about link building. In this instance, we'd rather focus on factors that we can control. And internal page factors, we can control.

When creating your web pages, you have to make sure that your site is optimized for the search engines. There are several things that you should do.

First, choose the keywords that you want to optimize the web page for. Don't choose something that is too general. For example, if your web page is about potatoes, don't just plug in the title "about potatoes". Give it a more specific title, like "How to grow potatoes in your own backyard." The search engines are there to help people find the exact information that they are looking for in the shortest possible time. So give the search engines what they want, and in turn, they will give you what you want - targeted visitors.

Next, put the same keywords in the URL of the web page as well. You can do this by naming your HTML file as something like "my-keyword.html" instead of "somefile.html". There has been an on-going debate as to whether using a dash between the keywords or an underscore will help with the rankings. But from our own observations, they didn't matter too much. So go ahead and use a dash or an underscore. Also, it's important to note that it's good to keep the filename simple, like a static file with a filename that we've just mentioned. Some sites or content management systems use query strings in their URLs, and the search engines apparently don't like them very much.

And finally, generate useful content on website. If there's anything you can take away from this article, just remember this tip. This is, by far, the most important SEO "secret" that you'll ever come across. Write for human readers, not for the search engines. The search engines are there to serve the web visitors. So if you have got information that the web readers want, the search engines will come find you. This is a pull strategy. In other words, you attract the search engines to you, which is really cool.

Now if that sounds like a lot work for an SEO campaign, we have good news for you. There are, in fact, software that can help you do all that automatically - put in keywords in title tags, generate static web pages with simple URL, use meta description tags, and so on. All that is left for you to do, is to sign up for such a service, and create valuable and useful content.