Affordable Internet Marketing: Search Engine Optimization Tips

If you're an internet marketing newbie, search engine optimization may seem like a big convoluted mess to you and you may be thinking that there is no way that you can understand it at all. Nothing could be farther from the truth and, in fact, search engine optimization is an extremely affordable internet marketing solution. This article will explain why.

Search engine optimization has two parts. The first part is all about content: if your site is constantly updated with fresh and useful content, Google (or MSN, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) will pick it up. The second part involves making it easier for the search engines to find your site through simple coding and website design.

The first part will take some time to develop as you need to create the content and keep updating your site to keep it relevant to users. The second part you can do at any time and this will help users find your content more easily via Google, etc.

So how do you make it easier for search engines to find you? You optimize your site's content by using relevant keywords in strategic places where the crawlers (robots, or bits of code that are sent out regularly by the search engines looking for content) are known to look. Those places are your site's meta tags, your site's title, and your site's heading.

Meta tags: When search engines crawl a site, they will often read the meta tags first. Meta tags are located in the head of an html document and inserting relevant keywords here help search engine crawlers find your site much more easily.

Title: Your website's title is another place that the crawlers will check. Having your best keywords as part of the title of your site is another way to ensure that you get found. This helps the human looking at the search results catch your site within the listings as well. For example, let's say you have a site about grooming cocker spaniels. It would make sense for your title to be something like "Tips For Grooming Cocker Spaniels." This not only tells the search engine crawler, "hey, here's a page about grooming cocker spaniels," it will tell that searcher looking for information about grooming cocker spaniels that this is a site with the information they're looking for.

Headings: Again crawlers scan through your site looking for relevant words in order to return results to hungry websurfers. Having keywords in your headings helps in this regard. This is another area that will help with the human quotient as well.

I'd like to insert a word of caution here: there is a tactic known as "keyword stuffing" that is used by unscrupulous webmasters, and you should definitely not do this if you want to remain indexed by the search engines. Keyword stuffing involves using the same keywords all over your site, over and over again, as well as using keywords that are irrelevant to the subject matter of your site, but popular among searchers. You don't want to do this because, 1: repeating the same keywords over and over again makes your site content read very poorly and people will just click off without othering to read such garbage, and 2: the search engines have built-in checks to see how relevant the keywords you are using are to your site content. If you are using keywords that are completely unrelated, your site will be removed from the listings.

Search engine optimization is not some mystical, mysterious endeavor that only the most savvy of webmasters are privy to. Search engine optimization is an easy task that almost anyhone with a little knowledge on the basics can do to improve his standing in the search engines, and is an extremely affordable internet marketing strategy, since it costs you nothing to implement.