SEO for beginners and first time webmasters can be time consuming. The average webmaster likes to talk about their most important keywords. These words are usually the most competitive, have the highest volume, and are the most broad in scope. Very few webmasters know enough about SEO to really do anything about important keywords.

These often overlooked search terms, that are so important to a website’s placement in the search rankings, are a vital component of any search engine optimization (SEO) effort.

Without keywords for the search engines to index, there would be nothing to find in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Keywords are the function of the search engines. As a result of those searches, the your most important keywords are what lead potential customers to your web pages Take care of your keywords, and they will take care of you.

The importance of keywords to a website is felt in two ways. The first area of consideration, when writing the on page and off page content, is keyword placement on the page. Where the keywords are located is important, to varying degrees, with the major search engines.

The second area of importance for keywords is their density on the page. How many keywords appear on the page, makes a difference to all of the search engine algorithms. The choice of which keywords to target on a page is often of vital importance, especially for highly competitive keywords.

Keyword factors for consideration

SEO for beginners usually focuses around one engine, Google. Each search engine, from industry dominant Google, to Yahoo, to Bing, to the various other search engines, has a different keyword calculation. Some search engines permit heavier keyword numbers and density on the page, while some like Google, have much stricter allowable density levels. The placement of keywords, in any number of locations on the page, has different results in the various search engines as well.

Consideration must also be given to such additional on page keyword modifications as bolding, italic, and actual keyword type size used. Other important factors include the use of page titles, and their relative importance to the various search engines, as keyword delivery vehicles.

Consideration has to be given to the incoming link anchor text to a web page. Any content linked off page is, in fact, part of the receiving page’s total content. Taking into consideration, both the placement and density of a web page’s keywords, will pay dividends for any website owner. Fortunately, keywords can be used in such a way as to propel a site higher in the search engine rankings.

While there are certainly no magic formulas, a few common sense ideas will pay off for most web pages. Check back for Part 2 where you will find out how to laser target your keywords in an effort to rank in the major search engines!

Laser targeting the keywords

When planning which keywords to target on a page, a plan of action
should be the first step. Be sure to choose only one, or two at most
two keyword, for the focus of your efforts. In highly competitive
keyword situations, no more than one keyword should be the topic on
any page.

Keep the long term goal in mind, of ranking high for a particular
keyword or keyword phrase. To score high for that selected search
term, a serious effort is essential. Think one keyword, with
accompanying phrase, maximum for each page. In a competitive search
field, the single keyword approach is the only one worth employing,
if you want to rank well at all.

The site’s home page and internal pages should have slightly
different focus, but should be created with the overall goal in mind.
This is especially important for highly competitive keyword
situations. Often a series of pages, each one supporting the others
in an overall theme, is necessary to provide added keyword power.
Since low, medium, and highly competitive keyword conditions require
differing strategies, they need individual consideration.

For low competition search terms, there is no real need to
concentrate a page’s entire effort on a single keyword. In fact, it
might not be the best practice in that case at all. A beginner webmaster
can target two or even three low competition keywords on a page.

With few webmasters targeting those search terms, the page can be
focussed on all of them, ensuring the page be found by many different
searches. Of course, not all keywords are that easily optimized.

Moderately competitive keywords comprise perhaps the largest category
of search terms. A helpful practice, in the case of medium level
difficulty keywords is to use them all on the home page. By placing
the keywords front and center on the website’s home page, they become
the focus of several themes on the site.

Each targeted keyword should then be provided with individually
linked, and theme clustered internal supporting pages. By providing
additional theme and topic related pages, the keywords are given
extra support, and overall on and off page density.

For highly competitive keywords, much more concentrated effort must
be applied, to the highly sought after search term. In heavy
competition, only one keyword per page may be targeted. Any more than
that, and the page’s keyword focus is lost. The entire effort of that
page must be on that one all important search term.

Many additional focussed pages, perhaps even starting on the path to
an authority site, must also be created to support that highly
competitive keyword as well. The object is to create a powerful
website theme, built around that single keyword. Anything less, and
the site will be unable to compete for that term at all.

Regardless of the level of competition, it’s a good idea to become
dominant in as many search terms within the site’s topic as possible.
Once top search rankings are achieved with an important keyword, move
to the next one. The more keywords you have, the more paths are
available to enter the website, resulting in huge increases in
visitor traffic.

Visit the SEO Lair Blog for more information on SEO for beginners including keyword density, Twitter, Algorithms, and more!

When preparing articles for SEO the title tags are of vital importance, the very first step to getting your page ranking higher in any search. The title tag is the first thing the Google spider recognises on your website and enables it to go “Oh. This website is about such and such”. We know there is a whole algorithm that Google uses to compile and calculate where it’s going to rank websites. First it sends its spiders out, crawls the website, puts it into its index and then they have their big computers that do all the number crunching from all the analysis that they’ve done, compared to their algorithm. Their algorithm looks for what’s on the page and what’s off the page with title tag being it’s first point of call.

We’ll have a look at on-page optimization. Consider a standard html page, a normal website with navigation, with a little banner at the top, with some links and a title and body copy. If we break that down even more and look at the on page factors that we need to have in place. The most important is we need to do keyword research to select the keyword. We need title keywords that we’re sure other people are searching for. There is no point in ranking title tags for something really obscure if no one is searching for that keyword.

Use the free Google keyword research tool. Put in your broad phrase for your title tag. Say we’re doing soccer drills, type in ’soccer drills’ which would be your broad phrase and you could look for your keywords that you are trying to optimize underneath that. Each page will only ever get to be optimized for one keyword at any one point in time. You don’t want to optimize for multiple keywords, otherwise you confuse Google on what you are trying to do.

Have a look at, for example, the keyword ‘wine supplies’. So let’s say we’ve done our keyword research. On our main home page typically what we’ll do is optimize for a keyword that is more competitive and harder to rank. In this example, on the home page we are ranking our title tag for ‘making wine’. For our internal pages we are looking for slightly longer tail keywords. An example could be ‘wine supplies’.

Try to think of our typical html page, starting at the very top at the title tag and moving our way down. One of the first things we will see is the title tag. We have chosen our keyword as ‘wine supplies’. You will have to have the keyword in the title tag. But we have to remember where this information is going to appear. It’s going to appear at the top. It will also appear in the search engine. If we’re looking at our search results, the title of the page will appear with a blue underline.

There’s your title tag, and Google, when it crawls your page, will pull those tags. The title keywords are vitally important for multiple reasons. Firstly we need the keyword in the title tag because the user who is typing that keyword into Google has said I am interested in wine supplies. If they’re interested in answers to wine supplies, if something comes up that says ‘Wine Supplies Australia’, and another one comes up that says ‘Soccer Drills’ they’re obviously going to go for wine supplies because that is something that grabs their attention.

As you can see having your primary keyword in this tag creates the basis for all SEO essentials. If you only do one thing for getting your site ranking in SEO, make sure it’s getting your title tags spot on by using keywords that your users are searching for and making it as attention grabbing as possible. The use of Keyword research tools are important here.

Linking is neat if you know what you are doing. If you do not then you make a huge mess. Linking does work but it has had changes since it first started being used.

The key to using links is using them in moderation. In the past, it was typical practice to use thousands of links gotten with article submission software but as with plenty of other things in the marketing world, limiting the quantity of links is the best system to use now.

The market today is focused on content not quantity. This is great news since you currently have more space on your internet site and can remove the many links you have that aren’t truly manufacturing but you hated to remove them.

When you have an internet site with a couple of pages, use links to the different pages. All the links will have different content describing the pages. This increases traffic to the site thru the different pages and entices the people to browse through the remainder of the internet site too.

Have one of the links to the homepage of your site. Deep linking is using the right link to the specific page on the internet site. This is often a link from within your website or from another site you have exchanged a link. Use relevant pages of content to link to your pages. Tell the sources of the links you are limiting the links for future sources and this can create others to want to add links to your website before you meet your quotas of links.

Using this method creates excitement from webmasters since you are placing their links on a site with some links, which decreases their competition for users to choose their links on your site. It also states to potential sites needing to exchange links or add links that you are responsible and caring about the appearance of your internet site so they want to use the professional site you have created.

This technique of business tactics also hikes up your link popularity and directs more traffic to the pages on your site. It gives you more leverage to request better quality links when you have better traffic and link acceptance. Some sites will provide a lower level link when they exchange links, but you are now in a position to ask for a better link.

When you increase the value of your links you are linking to prime quality firms and sites. This is always superb for your business and website.

You need to realize that part of this process is sending traffic to other sites. Some folks get uncomfortable at this concept, but it will all come back to you a hundred times over. Regard it this way, you are actually building stronger links to your internet site when you help to raise the rankings of the sites linked to your internet site as they help to increase your website based on your links.