SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is considered to be the ‘holy grail’ of online marketing. Some folks admit to being a bit confused about SEO methods. That’s understandable. There are so many companies online offering the ‘hottest new thing’, that an online marketer should expect to be confused.
Many of the e-books available on the subject are either just re-hashed SEO tactics from someone else, whose e-book you also bought, or they’re already outdated. Who can a marketer trust these days? You can trust me, that’s who.
Why trust what I share with you about SEO? Because after all, I’m no "SEO guru." I’m just anther web writer who’s had the good fortune to learn about SEO from folks that’ve been doing it right for years themselves. There’s no trickery intending to fool web-crawlers (spiders), nor do I use incentives traffic (junk), and there’s no voodoo involved. The only voodoo is that voodoo that you do. I’ve no magic SEO bullet to sell you. All I’d hope for is you share this page on good SEO practices with others by linking here.
Basic SEO works just fine on its own. Basic SEO begins on your site and very few services can offer as effective a service as they might claim. Some are truly good, but even in those cases, website owners are dependant upon the systems that those services use.
So . . . Will you teach me the SEO Shuffle, Don?
You’re durn skippy I will. SEO practices are so easy to do that within just setting up a few pages you’ll be doing these like they’re second nature. So pay attention. There’s an SEO test at the end.
Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number one:
Find the right keywords that people search for-
Let’s say for example, that your website is one of so many that are on the topic of weight loss. Do you think consumers using Google.com are always searching for the exact term "weight loss"? Probably not. So, how can you know exactly which keywords searchers are using?
It’s easy. My friends at http://www.Spacky.com offer you the power of entering your topic, then their security code, and Voila! You now see that while the term "weight loss" enjoyed 13.6 million inquiries last month on Google.com alone. But as you scroll down you notice the word "weight" by itself had 24.9 million search engine inquiries.
What does this mean to you? Well now you know to use "weight" as your primary keyword, and "weight loss" as your secondary keyword. From the list you’re probably able to find a decently-searched third keyword.
Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number two:
Distribute those keywords properly-
Now you know your ideal primary, secondary, and even a tertiary keyword to use in the text on your page. The first place you want to use them is in the title, and as briefly as possible, but twice if you can do it without looking like you’re just being redundant. Also, make sure your primary is used first, secondary second, and any others next. Place them as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
Throughout the body of your text you’ll want to mention all of your keywords twice in the opening paragraph, at least twice in the closing paragraph, and every 50 or so words throughout.
The ideal percentages are as follows: Your primary keyword should occur from 2% to 5% of all of the words in the piece. Your secondary keywords will fall between 2% and 4%. Do not place your keywords at such a frequency that you exceed 5% under any circumstances as spiders will see them as spam. You might read other folks saying the threshhold is 6%, but that’s simply not true. Please learn from my past mistakes and save yourself the hassle.
Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number three:
Double-check the placement of your keywords-
There’s another tool I’ll share with you today here. It’s called http://www.textalyser.net. All you do is copy and paste the body of your text into their "textalizer" and submit. Textalyser sends your piece through its process and shows you 1) the number of recognized words (words like a, as, in, is, off, out, of, the, and so on are ignored), 2) what percentages they’re at, and 3) complexity factors, readability, and such.
If your text work is way too high of a percentage (even .1%), add a few other words to bring it down a hair. If your keywords aren’t high enough then just add them in a few key places as long as the piece still reads naturally.
Readability and complexity are also factors of good SEO. But the only thing that controls them is the language skills of the author. If you’re not a native English speaker I’d recommend you catch a few movies in English and study the slang, the accents, and even a few pieces of current popular music.
Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number four:
Edit again-
This is the part that’s only enjoyed by those who’ve seen the benefit of doing it and making money from doing it. Believe it or not, SEO isn’t just about percentages of keywords, it’s about a lot of things. A major factor in good SEO practices is proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. (See? The teacher told you you’d need this someday. Were you listening?)
Minor punctuation typos have much less overall affect as do misspelled words. There’s a rumor going around that you can purposefully misspell words to be found by folks looking up words they’ve misspelled themselves.
Don’t do it! It may be tempting but the annoyance of misspelled words will come back up on you and bite you in the (uh-huh) because of the next tip.
Editing isn’t reading. Editing is when you go over your work one word at a time, and one piece of punctuation at a time, to make sure you’re well-spelled. It’s not as bad as it sounds . . . and even if it is, it’s worth it.
Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number five:
Ratings/Recommends count too-
Google.com has spiders eternally crawling the web looking not only for text that’s delicious to them based upon percentages and all that. But now they’re programmed to convey whether a text document is rated high by readers too.
It’s the internet’s way of knowing if there’s a possibility of talent, or popularity amongst readers. Some designers call it Google.com’s "last slap in the face," but that’s just a bit unfair to them. Google’s job is to insure their advertisers they’re getting the maximum return on their advertising dollar possible because of good SEO practices. So the more popular pages will rank higher in the organic search engine results. See how spelling helps you too? Badly misspelled words will not only not get you recommended . . . you’ll get "buried."
Best SEO Practices to Get Traffic to Your Website number six:
Update regularly-
Some folks much smarter than I have shared with me that the best thing you can do for an otherwise SEO’d site is to keep it updated with fresh content as often as possible. Google.com’s spiders find fresh, updated, unique content delicious, and keeping things fresh will help to keep drawing those spiders your way to communicate your level of SEO practices back to Google.com.
SEO is easy. Just like I said. At first the best SEO practices take a little time to get used to doing . . . but you must! As you continue to grow and learn from practice you’ll not only know the "how" but you’ll also know the "why" regarding the use of good SEO practices.
Oh. That test on SEO? I just wanted you to pay attention to the information on SEO for your own benefit. Hope you took notes.
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