Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about boosting your website to the top of the search engines when a person searches on a particular keyword. SEO can be intimidating, but it really can be boiled down to two processes:

1) on-page optimization and

2) link building.

Here we’ll cover some of the basics of on-page optimization.

On-page optimization is all about getting the right words on the right pages. Your first step is to build a list of the keywords and phrases that reflect your product or service. You can use keyword software tools such as WordTracker or Nichebot to perform your research. Realize that the more generic your keyword, the more web pages you will be competing with for position on the search engines. Try to choose more specific keywords. You’ll get less traffic, but it’ll be of higher quality.

Once you have the keywords that you want to use, you need to place them appropriately on your web pages. Ideally, each page should only use 1-3 keywords or phrases. If you find you want to put more than three keywords on a page, you probably need to break the content down and place it on separate pages. Where you place the keywords on the page is just as important as the keywords themselves. There are four areas of the page that should include your keyword:

1) The page title – this is your first level heading

2) The page headings – all headers should be in tags

3) The page text – this is your main content

4) The image alternate text – be descriptive in the image alternate text

Search engines have trouble crawling tables, JavaScrip, Flash, and images. Make sure these features aren’t limiting the search engines from seeing your entire page. Use alternate attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can’t be formatted in regular HTML. When you’ve finished the page, read it over from top to bottom. If it reads like it’s been optimized, you need to remove some of the keywords. Don’t write for the search engines, write for your readers. Overuse of keywords can get you blacklisted on the search engines.

After all this, you’ll want to make sure that the search engines are actually seeing your website. On Google, you can do this by typing “cache:webaddress” in the search box. (For example, if your website is www.widgets.com, search on cache:widgets.com.) This will tell you when Google last viewed your site. You can also find which web pages are indexed with Google by typing in “site:webaddress” in the search box. (Again, this would be site:widgets.com in our example.) The result will display a list of all the pages of your website that Google sees. If you have a new site, or your site hasn’t been picked up by a search engine, you can submit your site to each search engine directly. Here are the links for submitting a site to a few of the more popular search engines:

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl/

Bing – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Yahoo - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ MSN Live – http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

photo credit: Nina Yasmine