An SEO Primer for Search Engine Ranking

Copyright (c) 2007 Quick Turn Marketing International, Ltd.

You could easily spend a good chunk of your life reading about SEO. But it's not needed. You don't need to endlessly tweak, research, track, and tweak some more to get outstanding rankings.

But It does require some knowledge, effort, and patience.

You can get a respectable start with the information I'm about to share with you. Then you can take it to what ever level you desire.

First, you need to know about the two main areas of website SEO:

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO

On-Page factors include anything done to your website to improve its search engine rankings.

Off-Page factors are efforts external to your website, such as submitting articles and building links, to improve your rankings.

And here's some very useful information for you...most of your results will come from off-page factors. So you know where you should be concentrating your efforts. Don't ignore on-page SEO. It's important and contributes to your rankings.

On-Page SEO include the following:

Site and page title:

The site title is one of the most important on-page factors. The search engine spiders will read your site and pages titles and use that, in comparison with other on-page factors, to help determine rank.

One common mistake with writing the title is using something generic. You never want to do that. Your titles should be relevant to the page it's associated with. By relevant I mean 'contains' appropriate keywords or keyword phrases.

H1 Tags:

H1 or Heading-1 tags are nearly as important as title tags. As you may have guessed, these tags tell the search engines that your page is about what the title is specifying. And it's important to place your primary and even secondary keywords into your H1 tags.

Keyword Density:

Keyword density still matters but it's not as important as it used to be. You'll be safe with a general rule: Mention your keyword several times early, then a few times through the body of the text and again near the end of your copy.

The search engines, led by Google, are implementing LSI, Latent Semantic Indexing, in their ranking algorithms. Geeky LSI is hard-core mathematics. But for marketers, just try to include "natural" terms associated with your primary and secondary keywords in your main text.

Internal Link Structure:

This simply refers to your internal navigation menu. Or where your links point to within your site. One very common mistake is using the "home" link.

Take the primary keyword for your home page and substitute it for "Home" in the rest of your site's pages. Doing this will help build internal link popularity for that keyword. Then do the same for your internal pages. Always use the primary keyword for a page in any links pointing to that page.

Off-Page SEO Factors:

Off-page SEO usually involves building back links to your website using your main keyword as the anchor text for those links.

And your link campaign should use not just one method but multiple methods. The reason simply being if one method stops working, you have the others. You're not putting all your eggs in one basket!

Link-Building Methods:

Reciprocal Linking:

Reciprocal linking involves two webmasters putting a link on their site for the other. Most marketers did this manually in the past. But now you can join services that make it very easy to exchange links.

One-Way Links:

These are the most coveted links to have...especially if they're from a relevant authority site. Some are saying reciprocal links are being phased out or becoming less effective. But it won't hurt you to have some reciprocal linking happening.

You can accumulate one-way links through...

Article Submissions:

You'll write an article on your topic, or use private label articles, then insert your author biography at the footer of the article. Your footer will include a link to your main site.

Then submit these articles to article directories. If your article is published you'll have a nice one-way link to your site.

Buying Links:

You can buy links online if you want. The biggest benefit is that you can get high PR links affordably and fast. But you do need to exercise some caution with buying high PR links. Search engines, most notably Google, frowns on link buying and will penalize your site if they suspect you've done it. So watch out!