Search Engine Optimization is an Art Form

By Robert Kelsey

When you get right down to it, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the implementation of some basic knowledge to your web pages. When you get the many bits and pieces of this basic knowledge put together and onto your pages, your entire site will come together as a whole with the result being well ranked pages.

If you were to ask me what to do first, I would probably say that your should learn something about SEO and optimization before you build your site. Since you probably already have a site, this is a moot subject. What you will need to do is learn the SEO techniques and then apply them to your site by making changes to it.

I have seen many people make the mistake of jumping into SEO without having the knowledge to really make the correct changes to their site. These people inevitably load their pages with keywords and do a lot of things that are just going to hurt your ranking, or the ability of your site to ever be ranked.

Search engines are looking for "natural" appearance. Not visually, but to them, as spiders and robots. They may expect to see a keyword four, five or six times on any given page, but definitely not 50 times. If you investigate sites that rank in the top five positions you may see a trend where the sites don't appear to be optimized. One huge part of optimization is developing inbounds links and utilizing good keywords to help and define your site as exactly that ... your important keywords.

Although SEO really is a lot of common sense, the adage that common sense isn't common can play very true with SEO. You need to do some studying of SEO techniques in order to develop your strategy, for your site. Visit all the sites you can and read. Then read more. Everything that you need to know in order to succeed with your site in online as available information. If you apply optimization techniques properly to your website, and get inbound links, you will succeed.

Let's face it, without listings "above the fold", (visible without scrolling) on the first page at Google, you are just not going to get many visitors. You need to get your site into these top positions in order to make any real advancement in your online marketing.

So you need to work on all of the different parts of any given web page that will make it conform closely to the search engines algorithms, well for Google, MSN and Yahoo! anyway. They are the three big engines that will generate 99+% of all the traffic you will get from the organic search engine listings.

There are many optimization techniques, both on-site and off-site. The main on-site changes you will want to make will be to improve or add on the 1) title tag, 2) code attributes (alt=, title= and summary=), 3) keyword density, 4) use of H1 and h2 tags, maybe even using H3 tags, 5) your navigation and anchor text used, 6) meta description and keywords tags and 7) internal linking. Get all these things right and you have the major SEO efforts taken care of.

About the Author:

By Robert *BK* Kelsey at Ethical SEO Service. If you wish to find out more about Ethical Search Engine Optimization you can do so at the www.EthicalSEOService.com site today.