After working on your website (or blog) for a long time, you have finally perfected it and have gotten your hard work out on the Internet. Only one problem, how are people supposed to find it? This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. But what exactly is SEO? SEO is a way to improve traffic to a webpage through natural or unpaid search results instead of through a paid inclusion, such as a sponsored link on Google. What does this mean for you? Most importantly, it means that it is a way to get more people seeing your hard work without spending more money.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what SEO is, it’s time to get into how you can get your webpage to the top of the search returns. When search engines crawl sites, they will look at your titles, descriptions, and keywords. In order to make sure your website is listed towards the top of the returns, you need to make sure you have all of these, and that you have chosen the right keywords that you want to optimize for. As an example, lets say you own a small pizzeria in Phoenix. The odds of reaching the top of the search results for “pizza” or “restaurant” are pretty slim. However, if you focus on more specific keywords such as “delivery pizza” “wood oven pizza” “old world pizza” or “late night pizza,” the odds of being a top hit increase dramatically. These are commonly referred to as “long tail” or “buying” keywords.  These keywords are great to optimize for because they are searched less frequently, but when they are searched the likelihood of a conversion is much higher.  After you chose your keywords, you have to incorporate them into your page. This is where the page title, Meta tags and alt tags are important.

• Title tags

The <title> tag defines the title of the document.  These are the most important part of your SEO strategy because it is what many search engines give the most weight to.  Also, your titles are what search engines will display on the results page.

• Alt Tags

These are text descriptions of photos.  By having accurate ALT tags, search engines will see the page as higher quality and your images are more likely to appear in image searches.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are special HTML tags that instruct search spiders what to look for and where to go on a web page.  The most common are the Meta Description and Meta Keyword tags.

• Meta Description tags

These contain a description of the webpage. What is located within the Meta Description tags will be displayed under the title on the search result page.

• Meta Keywords

Meta Keyword tags are less important than the description tags, as they have been so abused; many search engines simply ignore them.  This doesn’t mean you should skip them, but keep this in mind when deciding how much time to invest in fixing these.

While there are more complicated and technical things you can do to move up in the search results, these simple, basic techniques will greatly improve the likelihood of reaching the first page of results. Remember that most people will click on links on the first page, and almost half will change their search terms if they can’t find what they are looking for on the first page, so spend some time working on your long tail keywords, and if you need help try using the Google keyword tool.

Cheers!

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