Hello SEO Optimise For Website Traffic

How’s your SEO?

If you are trying to make money online you will have heard the term SEO, but do you really know what it is?

SEO or search engine optimisation is the flavour of the month or should I say, past couple of years and it is considered a vital skill to have in your business armoury but you need to know how to use it to your advantage otherwise it can bite back.

You read so many articles saying optimise your page, use your keyword over and over, let the search engines know what your page is about and you will rank higher. This is true to a certain extent but it is not search engines who are your paying customers, you need to write the content on your page so that humans can read it and understand it.

There are a few accepted ground rules when it comes to SEO and they are fairly easy to grasp. If you follow the basic rules but write your articles for your readers then ranking will follow, it may take a little longer but it will also last. Writing content for the search engines will possibly get ranked in the results faster but it will also drop out of the listings like a stone, never to be seen again.

The basic rules for SEO are:

Page Title; That’s the bit at the top of your screen in the blue bar. Obviously if your page is about red dog leads then you would expect the page to be called red dog leads.

Meta Tags: There are two main meta tags, description and keyword. If you construct your own HTML you put these in the header, if you build with wordpress and use All In One SEO which you do, don’t you? you fill in the boxes at the bottom of the edit post page.

The keyword meta tag is pretty useless now except for keyword spy programs and Matt Cutts at Google has said that they ignore it, fill it in or don’t your choice.

The description tag is a different matter, this tag is about 160 characters long and is the snippet that shows in the search results. It is vital that you put a meta description in your page for two reasons.

1) When the snippet is shown any words that the searcher has entered into the box will be bolded, if they search ‘red dog leads’ and your meta description has ‘red dog leads’ in it the words will be bolded, this makes it more likely that a searcher will click on it.

2) The meta description is your little sales page, if you write a compelling description even if your page is down the page a bit it is again more likely to get that click.

Heading Tags: There is one tag that is vital and this is the h1 tag. This tag is your headline and the words within it do get attention from the search engines. If a page has a headline that says’ Red Dog Leads’ the SE’s will use that in their algorithm to decide what your page is relevant to. There are a descending list of tags,
h2, h3 and so on and these should be used to format the page, readers like it because it chops the page into smaller parts and SEs like it because they ‘see’ how the information is arranged.

Image Tags: Search engines cannot read images, you could have a picture of Cheryl Cole on the page but if you use the image tags the search engines will think it’s a picture of red dog leads. It would be pointless for your readers and so keep your images relevant but use your keywords in the tags.

Link Titles: If you have a link on the page give it a title, this is just extra information but it can be used for getting a keyword on your page.

Keyword Density: If you are targeting a keyword or phrase you need to make sure it is on the page in its exact form so, ‘red dog leads’ and ‘dog leads red’ are different keywords, related but different. Ensure your keyword is included about once for every 100 words or 1%, no more than 2%. Any more than this can mark your page as spam and it will get slapped.

All this seems a lot to remember but there are tools that can help you and one I use for just about every page is Traffic Travis, there’s a free or paid version but I only use the free one for double checking my posts. It’s quick and just catches the odd error here and there.

One more point, and it’s related, is off page SEO, this is primarily aimed at the guys that do link building with articles but everyone should be aware of it.

If you submit an article to EzineArticles for instance, you get the chance to put a couple of links to your site in the resource box at the bottom. These links can be very profitable if you use them correctly.

Always use your keywords as the anchor text, do not put something like ‘ Find out about Good SEO Here‘ unless you want to be ranked for ‘Here.’

Finish your article with a couple of sentences that follow on from your article seamlessly and find out about good seo and keyword research and how it can bring you more website traffic.