Monday, January 26, 2009

Search Engine Optimization Techniques You can Use on Your Own



Can you think of a reason to run a website if you never get any visitors? Anybody who is successful making money with a website will tell you... if you have no traffic, you are not going to make much money with your site. And while there are plenty of methods out there that will help increase your traffic, the best is search engine optimization. Why? Because any traffic that Yahoo, Google, or the other search engines send your way will be the most valuable traffic your site will receive.

Search engine optimization is done in a variety of ways, including on page and off page. And while there are some very important off page techniques you should use, on page aspects of search engine optimization are the most important. Though an SEO service can really help with your search engine optimization, there are some on page improvements you can make on your own to improve your search engine rankings.

The first on page search engine optimization method is keyword research. Many website owners build their sites without doing deep keyword research for each page and topic. And while they might get lucky with a few popular keywords, the chances of them using the most profitable keywords in their niche are pretty slim. If, however, you explore which are the most profitable keywords for your site (which would be the keywords with the largest volume of demand and the lowest number of competing sites), ranking for some good keywords will be easy. Which will make your search engine optimization efforts that much more effective.

Another very important aspect of on page search engine optimization is putting quality content on your site. When you have done keyword research as part of the search engine optimization process, you use those keywords to tell you what content people are looking for. And if the content you use is some of the highest quality, and you use lots of it, search engine optimization will be that much simpler. Links and traffic will begin to build as a simple matter of course.

For every page you create for your website, there are several simple SEO methods that often tend to go "under the radar" for most webmasters... they simply do not think to use them. For the purpose of search engine optimization, two of the most important "extras" you can use are the title and meta tags. The title tag is located at the top of your page. Using keywords, the title tag informs the search engines of the topic of your page. It is key to use your keyword here, as well as in the meta tag. The meta tag provides a description of the page on your site, as well as an indication to search engines that your page is content focused. Many leave these out altogether... something which, to put it mildly, does not help your site's search engine optimization.



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