I can’t tell you how important Search Engine Optimization is for a website.  It could literally mean the difference between, utter failure and a multi million dollar website.  But yet, I find it hard to believe that many don’t make it a priority.   This can be for a number of reasons. Some are intimidated by it, some are just ignorant to it, and some are just too lazy to implement it.

Well I am here to tell you guys that SEO is not brain surgery, and if done properly, you can reap the rewards.   It is actually a very simple process to understand.  With a little patience, motivation, and time, anyone with a basic understanding of  web development can succeed.

This will be my first report of many that I will write over the next month or so regarding the

You Need Good Content!

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see people make with their websites. They do not ad enough content to their website, and if they do they do not insert the keywords that they are trying to target. Some even make the mistake of adding to many images on their home page.  Little hint guys. Google’s spiders do not read images.  They read the “alt tag” of the image, but not the words inside an image.

So basically, the first thing you want is good content on your pages.  DO NOT copy other people’s content from anywhere on the web. You will be thrown into a supplemental index, that no one will read and is basically SEO suicide. Always write your own content, and if you are not good at writing content, hire a professional copywriter.  If you need a good copy writer CLICK HERE. A good copy writer will make sure that your content is keyword rich, and is highly optimized for your keywords, without looking unnatural.

Other things to consider with content:

1) Keyword saturation should be around 2-5% through out the page. So basically if you are trying to target “dog training”, you want that keyword scattered throughout your content and be 2-5% of the keyword.

2) Use alt tags for your images. Alt tags are a way to explain your images with keywords. Since Google’s spiders do not read images, they read the alt tags.  Alt tags look like this.

<a href=”http://yourwebsite.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://yourwebsite.com/2j.png” border=”0″ alt=”ENTER YOUR KEYWORD DESCRIPTION HERE”></a>

**Hint- When organizing your page, try to put relevant images with alt tags relevant to the content near each other.  Get it?

Title Tags

Proper title tags are important.  Titles tags has been, and most likely will always be one of the most important factors in acheiving high search engine ranking.

So what is a title tag?

The title tag is an HTML tag with text describing a specific Web page (but not visually displayed on the page). The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page and be constructed following specific guidelines.

Here is what title tags look like in the search engine if you already don’t know..

Here is what they look like in your source code. Notice where it says <title>Your Title Here</title>

I see a ton of website that try to stuff tons of keywords into their title. With my experience this is just not effective. It is most effective when you use 2-3 keyword, that are relevant to your keyword in your content.

For example:

<title>DogTraining.com: Dog Training | Dog Training Tips | Train My Dog</title>

Or if you want to lazer target your page do something like this.

<title>DogTraining.com: Dog Training Tips</title>

Now, another thing that is important is you want to make sure that each individual page has different title tags. It is a waste if your title tag is the same on every page of your website.  If you are selling hardwood flooring for example:

Home Page:

<title>Products-Limited.com: Hardwood Flooring Specialist</title>

Say they have a Brazilian Cherry Page:

<title>Products-Limited.com: Brazilian Cherry Hardwood</title>

Or a Pre-finished oak hardwood page:

<title>Products-Limited.com: Pre-finished Hardwood Flooring</title>

*Bonus Tip: Make sure that your titles are under 70 characters (letters) in length. Anything more than 70 will be truncated by Google and will not show on the results page.

You get the idea right? It is important to make sure that Google sees each page individual to the other.  This will help you achieve higher ranking over time.

Stay tuned! In the next few days I will be writing about Backlinking, and why it is the most important aspect of Google’s algorithms.