SEO 101 - Lesson 1 - on Page Factors

I will first start with the basics on SEO or (search engine optimization) is a strategy to get your web site ranked high in the major search engines for a specific keyword in a natural or organic manor. Optimizing a website primarily involves on-page factors,off- page factors, and the domain name.

Domain structure - Keep your domain as short as possible. Use your main targeted keyword if possible. If you can't find one try adding a hyphen or find a word that is relevant to the keyword.

On page factors are basically the content on your site and the meta tags. You need to have good keyword rich and good quality content that is relevant to your site.Your keywords need to be place in the title, description, the top right corner, bottom right, and spread evenly through out the page. Generally you should try to have about ten percent of your text the keyword you are targeting. Plus add variance keyword (varying the usage of the targeted keyword) Also use bold and underlined text on some of the keywords. And only shoot for a couple keywords per page. It is very difficult to optimize for a ton of keyword on one page.

Your Meta tags tell the search engine your site's title, description and keywords. Without these tags, it's difficult for your site to achieve a high ranking on many major search engines. Meta tags provided a guide to each page's content. You also need to have your targeted keywords in the tags. Make sure you do not try stuffing the keyword in your tags or on you pages because intelligent search engines like Google can pick up on that and your site can be put in the sandbox. Which basically means your site will be put on probation and be deindexed. Plus you need to make your content look natural to your potential customers. There is a saying that many SEO writers and web designers use. write and create websites for human first and search engines second. Organic SEO is simply using a strong dose of good common sense. Once you feel that your page is fully optimize use a validator like validator.w3.org to check your page for errors. If your page has a couple small errors I would not worry about it. But if you see any warnings or a lot of errors I would try fixing the page before moving on to the off page factors.

The off page factors involve the number of inbound links or backward likes that you have going to your site. Which means the number of link your site has on other web sites. It is pretty much a popularity contest. the more relevant inbound links you have the better you rank. There a many ways to get inbound links like submitting to directories, writing articles, buying links (etc). I will go over the off page factor in more detail in the following lessons.

Make sure you check out my other lessons on (seo) 101 this is just the beginning. So I am going through the basics. The following lessons will give you some good input on generating traffic.

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