A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO SEO

Keyword Research is numero uno in the process of optimizing your web site and pay-per-click campaign. This step involves choosing the most apt keywords your target group requires to improve its ranking in search engines.
Keywords are nothing but words and / or phrases which people may use to locate your services, products, information or brands via search engines.

Step 1: Keyword Identification

The first activity in the keyword research process is the identification of keywords. Keyword identification means locating the keywords which are used by your target group. You look for related keywords. First, you identify the industry and then zoom into the specific field. For example, if you own this pet shop, you should take up keywords like: "cat food" and "dog food".

Step 2: Locate Your Keywords

The second activity in the keyword research process is a more informed and technical search. It involves finding keywords that people actually use and organizing them by their popularity.

To locate keywords and find out their popularities, you can make use of the Aleksika keyword search box to know more about the search behavior of your target audience. Learn what they call things, the way they identify subjects, how broad or how precise their search generally is. These parameters become essential in looking for the right keywords.

You may also access relevant and useful ideas for keywords from the collection of top keywords containing the top one hundred keywords of the last year or maybe a keyword directory that offers keywords organized by subject. Wordtracker is one such program that allows you to look for relevant keywords.

Step 3: Choose Keywords

The method of deciding on the right keywords involves the following steps. Copy all relevant phrases and counts onto a spreadsheet. After you have made an examination of all individual words and phrases that might apply to your website, you will have every single important phrase on your spreadsheet.

So obviously, websites which are older in time and already have a secured web presence, stand a better chance of getting higher ranks in the search engine. Listed below are some of the key factors for achieving the top positions in search engines.

• Clean Codes: All search engines prefer a neatly coded website. When a webpage is designed in MS Word, it generates untidy html code. This is not a good thing. Also, website owners need to be careful about the WYSIWYG editors. Some use proprietary tags in the html and thus become uncongenial to the search engines.

• Content: No saying would suffice for the stupendous importance of proper content that helps a website to score high in the search engines. Content is the backbone for any site. Search engines often look for relevant keywords or phrases in the body text of a webpage to identify those with the searched words/phrases. If found, your website is considered relevant for those keywords and you can expect a pretty good rank.

• Tags: Yet another very vital aspect in html coding is the tag--the title tags and meta-description tags. To give your website a decent search engine position, these tags must contain the relevant keywords which you think users will look for.

• Linking: Simply put, linking means other websites linking to your website. Now how would that help, you ask? This is good for your website precisely because the search engines consider each related link on your site as a given "vote". The logic is easy -- if site X links to site Y, it obviously follows that site Y is of some value or worthy of it. These links can either come from important directories like Yahoo! or Dmoz, or from other related websites. For instance, if your website promotes clothes, a link from a fashion house's website would be relevant and count as a good vote in search engine parameters. However, exchanging links with questionable sites like link farms is not appreciated. Link farms are considered worthless in the sense that these are directories that just collect links without any valuable content in them. So whenever you add links to your website, ensure that those links have your targeted keywords in their anchor text. Post articles or mention elaborately about your product and services is and then include links to your site. There are many important sites which post articles and appreciate sites with good content. So you may also popularize your website by putting up online press releases there. However, it takes a lot of effort, patience, time, skill and money to achieve the desired position in search engines for particular keywords. But when the results start showing, you will know that it is worth the wait.

Over the period of time, the topic of link exchange has also undergone a number of irreversible changes. Today, people are asking for money to exchange links to get higher PR sites. What can you do now? Well, you could buy maybe a couple of links at the most, if it is absolutely necessary. Apart than that, find out forums where you can post or discuss about your website. How? By simply Googling it. After that, when you get your membership, you can put your website URL within the signature box. Another way of off-page optimization is to submit articles to article directories. Articles also help to make your website popular.

But you have to write excellent CONTENT for your specific site. This is called a one way link, meaning there will be no reciprocal links. Work this out and submit your articles to around fifty free article directories or websites; this should lead to a good PR in say a couple of months. Articles work big time and in ways that are always not apparent immediately.