Your Guide to SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a very powerful tool in internet marketing. If you can get the various search engines to see your site, you have the potential to reach a large number of targeted visitors. However, in order to properly optimize your site, there are a few steps that you need to follow and respect, SEO is based on this few principles so learning them will insure you are on the right path of optimizing your website.

Use Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Properly

Optimizing your title tags with relevant, targeted keywords helps Google and other search engines pick up and find your article. Doing so helps search engines actually understand what your page of content or article is all about. Imagine looking through a magazine or newspaper. What's a big factor that helps you determine which articles to read? Yes, the titles do make that much of a difference both in print and on the internet.

Organize the Structure of Your Site

Use categories to properly arrange pages of your site. The most important and relevant content should be less clicks away from your home page. This helps determine the relevance of your content for search engines, and in addition, creates a better navigational and user experience for visitors. Keep the URLs for your articles and pages simple so they don't look spammy, as if you were keyword stuffing for the search engines. Google and the others know how to pick up on this type of spamming and can penalize your rankings for such wrongdoing.

Make your content accessible to most people with clear titles and anchor text. Think of a table of contents for an encyclopedia. The more clearly things are laid out, the more likely people will find what they're looking for. In addition, this helps show you're a viable source on the internet for your topic.

Get Some Exposure

You want to find that happy medium between enough exposure for people to see the important parts of your site you want them to see, while providing enough security that spammers and hackers won't make your site a playground. By providing value in your site and its content, people are more likely to link back to it.

Think of these backlinks to your site as votes. The more backlinks you have, the better you'll look in the eyes of the search engines, which in turn helps you rank. People may be linking back to your with hyperlinks that say "Click Here", but it's better if they link to you with relevant keywords such as "SEO Guide" for this article.