SEO doesn’t have to be complex

and by following these simple on-page optimization techniques you can give your SEO campaign the perfect start.

SEO is often seen as being a difficult and in-depth process, but the reality is that by following some reasonably common sense guidelines it is possible to get good rankings. That’s not to say that optimization is a simple or quick process; there are, unfortunately, no short cuts. Your SEO efforts should be a concerted and long term effort in order that you will enjoy the best possible results and should incorporate both on-page and off-page optimization techniques. By following the on-page SEO strategies below you can set a strong foundation to all your SEO work.

Keyword Research

Before you begin penning content and writing title and meta tags you first need to research the keywords you will use on each of your pages. Using the wrong keywords can negatively impact your entire campaign, causing you to lose untold hours and days of work and eventually forcing you to concede that you made the wrong decision and start all over again.

The most appropriate and most beneficial keywords are popular enough that they will enjoy regular searches but without being prohibitively competitive or overly generic. A number of keyword research tools exist and your competitors’ websites are a good place to start your early research. Ensure keywords are targeted specifically to the type of content you will provide as well as the service or product you will be selling. More targeted keywords will result in more targeted visitors and targeted visitors mean greater conversion rates and an improved return on your efforts.

Niche And Semantically Related Keywords

A good strategy is to incorporate a reasonable list of competitive keywords with less competitive ones. The more niche keywords will serve you well during the early days of your website and over time you should be able to start competing for the more challenging of the keywords you use. Also incorporate semantically or topically related keywords into your keyword list because the search engines are placing more and more emphasis on those pages that use related keywords as well as primary keywords.

Accesibility And Standards

Site accessibility is an integral part of good website design but it should also be considered an important factor in any SEO strategy. Using standards based code for your website will help to ensure that anybody that wishes to access and view your website will be able to do so. It will also mean that the spiders used by search engines will be able to access and index your pages effectively ensuring that you get the full credit for your site.

Navigation And Intra-Linking

Your navigation menu and internal links should be prominently placed, easy to see, and easy to follow for the spiders. It is good practice to include a text link from the home page to a compliant sitemap on your site, alleviating any potential problems that might arise from broken links or the use of graphical or flash based navigation menus. You can also consider adding links into the main body of your content, although too many will make the page difficult to read and therefore diminish the overall effectiveness so don’t get too carried away.

Title And Meta Tags

While search engines do not specifically use the meta tags to help assess the value of a page like they once did, meta tags are still critical to good SEO performance. The title and description tags that you add at the top of a page are used in various ways including in the compiling and display of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This is the first thing a potential site visitor will see from your site so this mini listing needs to be as effective as any paid advert or PPC ad. Poorly written titles and descriptions can put many readers off viewing your pages so a little time and effort here can have a very positive effect.

Using your keywords in the title and the description is good practice because these will be highlighted in the search results if they were used in the search query itself. This will make your result more prominent and instantly identify your page as being relevant to the user. Don’t needlessly use keywords, however, and don’t throw extra keywords into the description at the cost of a well written, short ad.

Other Formatting Tags

On-page content should always be written with the visitor in mind, although obviously it can still be optimized for search engines. As such, proper page structure is important to your reader as well as to the engines. H1 and H2 tags are an effective way of breaking up page content, and give readers the chance to skim through a page and determine its relevance.

A page should only contain a single H1 tag at the top of the content but can include multiple H2 and H3 tags. Alt tags on images should also be included and these as well as the actual file path to the image itself can include important keywords (but do make sure that they actually make sense and are more than just a keyword thrown in for the sake of SEO).

Page Content Optimization

Finally, we get to the heart of the page - the content itself. Use the keywords you researched for a page including semantically related keywords. Write as naturally and appealingly as possible while keeping those keywords in mind and don’t get carried away stuffing or cramming them into the body of the text. Not only is this unappealing to readers but is seriously frowned upon by the search engines.

The reader really is the most important aspect of your content. If the majority of your visitors are coming from the search engines remember that they arrived using specific keywords. This means that they are searching for equally specific information relating to those keywords - make sure you deliver on the promise that you made in your title and description tags.

About the Author:

Matt Jackson - WebWiseWords is a content writing service enabling website owners and online business owners to buy web content tailored to their needs. Services include affordable and high quality SEO content writing and more.

Let’s face it, anyone can build a website. There are countless companies out there offering a vast array of web building solutions, some good, some great, and some quite frankly are a complete waste of time! But throwing together a website is really only part of the story, only part of the process. There are literally, hundreds of thousands of web pages, that won’t ever be viewed and therefore stand no chance of commercial success. Some of those sites are relatively good; unfortunately their owners have misunderstood the process and have the cart before the horse…

In the online world no one just happens by your website, credít card in hand! If you’ve yet to build your website, or about to create a new site, stop! consider first exactly what you wish to achieve with that site, before you start. “Creating a website should follow a process proven to deliver a commercial end result… or run the risk of ending up, just another pretty picture in cyberspace!”

Fortunately there is a process, and I highly recommend you take a look at it… perhaps you already know it…

Content > Traffic > Pre-sell > Monetize

A time tested, 4 step process, proven to produce websites that deliver… commercially! Ok so, let’s now look briefly at each step and why they work in this particular order.

1. Numoro Uno, as always. Content.

Very, very important. Building information-rich sites is crucial. You must have high quality, unique, relevant content on your site, A; because you want to attract visitors in the first place and B; to generate long term, search engine based free traffic.

Online, people are looking for solutions, for information that leads to solutions. They use the search engines to hunt for the most relevant facts to reach this end goal solution. Your job is therefore easy… give it to them… but don’t just plonk down any old garbage and hope for the best… take your time, put in the effort, provide good quality information that will over-deliver and keep your visitor interested, satisfy her need and you will be rewarded. Over time, gradually add new fresh, useful content and you will be creating web pages valued by humans and search engines alike. On the internet, high value content is king!

2. Traffic… Ahh! The Holy Grail…

Much has been written on the subject, and many are making a good living providing (?) this elusive element.

Truth is, (excluding social media) there are but two ways to get it - you either pay for it, or you optimize for it. If you take the time to understand the basics, you can easily do both.

Paid search, (PPC) such as Google Adwords has its place, and can provide an immediate stream of targeted visitors to your website; however it is a study of its own and can, if not understood, be very costly very quickly! If you want to go that route learn with small amounts (of money) and don’t be tempted to throw good after bad… owch! been there!

Safer and arguably better, is optimization (SEO) for the organic results, as reached via a Google or other search engine search. This is simply intelligent website construction, a process anyone can do. The important point is, the optimization should be built in during the creative process, at the time you’re constructing the site; you are literally building your website to principles that make it search engine friendly, thus leading to high natural positions in organic search results, leading to of course, significant free traffic flow to your site…

3. Don’t sell… Pre-sell.

You have created a website with value rich content, and fully optimized its pages for indexing by Google (and other search engines)… Folks are arriving at your site as directed by their search results. You are keen to have them buy your goods or services, ready with your pitch… but wait! There’s another vital step in the process of converting your visitors into customers, and you’ve done half the work already…

Pre-selling is a warming up process, whereby you develop trust and confidence in your offering… it’s already well known that people are more willing to buy from those they like, trust or respect. By over-delivering relevant high value information, without appearing to be forcing a sale you will almost by default, create an atmosphere that inevitably leads to sales. Simple!

As far as your visitor is concerned, her needs are being met, his wishes are being fulfilled, you are providing the very information that is the solution to that which they are searching for in the first place. Pre-selling creates an open-to-buy mindset that smoothly introduces your visitors to your monetization offer.

4. Monetize.

Ok thanks for sticking with me, here’s the home run… This is where you make your offering enticing by introducing and highlighting the many benefits of your product or service, and detailing exactly how it offers the solution to their predicament. You have paved the way with informative, relevant content and can now look to close with persuasive sales copy.

Your call to action should be strong and concise. Tell your prospect exactly what they need to do to order. If you have a good product, and you should, let them know exactly how they will benefit by ordering from you… Today!

So there it is… in brief… A formula simple, yet highly effective. Generate targeted free traffic via your highly optimized website, provide information packed content that offers solutions, warm up or pre-sell your visitors by over-delivering on the quality of that content, then and only then, monetize by introducing persuasive, benefit focused sales copy to convert pre-sold visitors into enthusiastic customers. For full details on how to implement each of these steps (with no technical knowledge whatsoever!) grab yourself a free 48 page e-copy of The Simple Art of e-Persuasion at the info link below… or visit my site.

About The Author
Brye Bishop is a highly successful internet entrepreneur and marketer, committed to providing quality source information and assisting others in their quest for fínancial freedom. Clickfig.com …Get your free copy of The Simple Art of e-Persuasion now, simply email “eBook offer” to info@clickfig.com

Initially he was angry…

He just received a $500 bill from a plumber and the plumber was in his home for less than 10 minutes. That’s when he questioned the plumber…

“How can you charge $500 for less than 10 minutes of work when all you did was bang a couple pipes?”

The plumber’s response was simple… “Well sir, it’s $5 for the 10 minutes I was here and $495 for knowing exactly where to bang the pipe!”

The lesson is simple…

The difference between failure and success is sometimes very small. However, knowing exactly what to tweak can be the difference between making a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars.

Here’s a few real-world examples:

PersuasionX

When you click that link, you’ll find a detailed video presentation where you’ll hear how a few simple (but very powerful) persuasion techniques can very quickly translate into thousands of extra sales.

Little tweaks… big returns.

It’s about knowing “what” to tweak in your sales presentation and how to tweak it to get the absolute best result. Some of the stories you’ll hear about are fascinating… All they did was tweak a few minor things but the results were dramatic…

One person went from selling zero one week to $82,000 the next. Another person averaged over $250,000 from each of his next 5 presentations. One student did over $500,000 in one of his very
next sales presentations using these “tweaks”.

Please understand something… These aren’t major changes to the content of their presentation. They are subtle selling techniques that have an enormous difference to your bottom line. In fact, after this training, countless students are now averaging over 20% in their closing ratio.

PersuasionX

If you have ever wanted to sell more of your products and services then you need to go watch this video as soon as possible. I know you’ll enjoy it.

Take care.

Ross “The Pit Boss”

P.S. Click on the link below right now because the seminar offer expires soon.

PersuasionX

Well, Brett Ingram has done it again. His new traffic generating site is Traffic Python, and he says “boy does it deliver!” Not wanting to just take his word for it (which I never do, even though I have spoken with Brett on several occasions) I decided to test drive it and see for myself. After all, that’s why I’m here, to “take the gamble so you don’t have to.”

Ok so the Traffic Python site is dead easy to sign up to. If you’ve signed up for any of his other great sites, you already know what I mean about this being a no fuss registration process. They do offer 2 upgrade options but they are not required to gain the benefits. Once you’ve signed up and logged in, you can now start setting up your Python links.

These are cloaked links that give you two benefits at the same time. The first is, of course, that they are cloaked. As you know, cloaking your link, especially if it’s an affiliate link, is a requirement to keep others from stealing your commissions. The second benefit is that each time your Python link is clicked, you earn ad credits.

This brings me to the second part of the Traffic Python system: the Python Ad Generator. This area allows you to create any type of ad you want. Once you have at least one link and one ad, you can start to gain the full benefits of Traffic Python. Each time your new Python link is clicked, an ad gets displayed by a cool slide-up ad window at the bottom. Each ad window has an image with your affiliate link that goes back to Python.

If someone clicks that image link, and sign up at Traffic Python, they become your referral. This is a great viral feature that lets you build referrals without even trying just by using the site. Also, when they click your link and the ad displays, your ad now earns credits and displays in the ad windows when other members’ links get clicked.

All of this works virally too, meaning as you gain referrals into Python (either by promoting it or just using it and visitors click the Python image on the ad window to join) you also earn ad credits on THEIR link clicks. And this works up to 5 levels deep. So you can create a massive amount of free ad views and web traffic by referring others to Traffic Python also. Pretty slick!

One of the innovative items that Brett has included with Traffic Python is that you can now designate the category of ads that get displayed when your link is clicked! By this I mean you have the ability, when creating your Python links, of deciding what category of advertisement will show up when someone clicks your link. So, if you cloak a link for let’s say for an audio site, you can tell the software to show audio & video ads when the link is clicked. This is an amazing feature, and one that I applaud Brett for introducing.

One other feature is the downline mailing that’s available. You can email your downline with offers, promotions, or whatever you like, and here is where Python really shines. They took the time to set up the emailing often enough that it’s valuable as a user, but no so often that it’s a burden to your downline. But the best part about this feature (and actually the credit earning too) is that it tells you exactly how long until you can mail again. Now, because the site just opened, I haven’t used that feature yet, but I’ll let you know how it goes when I do.

Overall, this is a simple yet powerful site, and it delivers on its promises. I highly recommend using Traffic Python if you are at all interested in increasing your traffic and advertising

All the best,

Ross “The Pit Boss”

Click the banner to check it out for yourself…

I found this excellent article by Bill Platt (Links and Traffic) and thought that it fit in very well with my previous article, and in the overall Internet Marketing niche. Please take a moment after you read this to check out his website. Enjoy!

Masters Of The Google Universe: How To Achieve Top Google Rankings

For years, it has been well known that Google’s search algorithm is driven by the number and quality of links pointing to a particular URL. And as a result, it was all the rage for some time to buy links on web pages that had a high Google PageRank (PR).

But in March of 2007, Google’s mouthpiece Matt Cutts declared that Google was going to fight back against Paid Links. Google put a shot across the bow of many online marketers, letting them know that the days of easily buying links from high PageRank pages in order to influence a website’s ranking in Google were over.

The Shot Heard Around The World

With Matt Cutts declaration, a world full of online marketers began to cry foul. It was said that “They can’t do that!”

But the truth was and is that the Google Search Algorithm is Google’s intellectual property, and therefore, Google can do anything they want within their algorithms - no matter who those changes might hurt or help.

By the end of the Summer of 2007, the people crying foul had quieted down a bit and got back to the business of trying to find new ways to manipulate their website’s rankings inside of the Google search results. That is the way it has always been and always will be.

The summer of 2007 was just such an oddity… For me, it has always been exciting to challenge the brains at Google to get my websites to rank well within Google’s search algorithms. But for some reason, at that moment in time, many of those who held the top rankings in Google felt as if it was their God-given right to be at the top of Google’s search results, and how dare Google oppose God’s decree in this matter.

Yep, I know I am going to catch flak for that statement - comparing a few webmasters to religious zealots - but that is how I roll sometimes.

For me, Matt Cutts was telling people to work harder to actually “earn” what they have been given. For me, it was a chance to re-dedicate myself to the goal of ranking well in Google for competitive keywords. I did not have to change anything I was already doing, because I have never gained a single ranking in Google by paying for a link from any web page. (wink)

Google’s Search Engineers Are Not Foolish

Matt Cutts has said time and again that Google does not want to attack any problem in their search algorithms by manually deleting any participant in the Google search ranking game.

Instead, Google in every case wants to program a solution to address a particular bad practice.

I guess it might be easier for me to understand since I am also a computer programmer. It is a hobby I really enjoy, and I exercise my mind with computer programming anytime I want to improve my own websites or to build a new website. I keep my brain sharp by solving problems in computer code.

So, whenever I see Google making moves in one direction or another, I try to visualize how I would solve their algorithm problems in computer code.

In my mind, solving the paid links issue was a super-easy solution. Just look at the pages linking to a particular website, and then do a cross-comparison of the PageRank of all of those linking pages. If all of the pages linking to a particular URL have a PageRank of Four or higher, then chances are that those links were artificially created, through some kind of paid linking system.

Let me explain this in an example, where all of the sample web pages have 100 inbound links each:

If Site A has all of its 100 links on pages that have a PageRank of 4 or higher, then that is unnatural and therefore suspect.

If Site B has all of its 100 links on pages that have a PageRank of 0, then those links offer no value to the Internet community as a whole, and therefore Site B should not measured as a quality search result.

If Site C has a mix of PageRank 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 links, then that is more natural in its structure and it also shows that some of the links are considered to have value in the Internet community as a whole. Therefore, Site C has proven itself worthy above Site A and Site B in Google’s search results.

This example should show in no uncertain terms how easy it was for Google to properly address the issue of paid links and to put a stop to people using paid links to manipulate their websites’ ranking in Google’s search algorithms.

Publication Standards

A couple years back, I wrote another article discussing this concept in relationship to article marketing. You can read that article with third-party commentary from Chris McElroy, aka NameCritic, on the Article Content Provider Blog.

In a nutshell, I was discussing the role of article directories in the article marketing industry. Again, this solution came to me from my programming mind. The simple way for Google to have dealt with all of the junk articles that have been written for the purpose of building links to a website is to look at the article in the context of where that article is published.

The article marketing carpet bombers send their articles to hundreds of article directories to get hundreds of links pointing to their website. But the role of the article directory has always been to be a repository where newsletter publishers and webmasters could go to find articles that they would like to reprint in their own newsletters and on their own websites.

Some article directory managers bring a commitment to providing publishers with only quality articles. Other article directory managers approve anything and everything sent to them.

Through computer programming, it is relatively easy to identify which websites are article directories and which ones are not.

If an article is of good quality, then niche website publishers will find the article and put it on their own website. If the article is a crap article, then the only websites that will accept it are those article directories that publish anything and everything given to them.

As a result, it is easy for Google to look at the Linking Portfolio (list of publishing websites) of a single article and to see which articles were considered worthy of reprint by human reviewers. If the article only exists on article directory websites, then the article must not provide any real value to other people. But if the article is of good quality, the article will be able to be located on article directories AND on niche websites.

This concept very elegantly feeds into Google’s overall strategy of determining which web pages people recommend to others. After all, if you look at Google’s PageRank, it is very simply a system which measures how many people have voted on the quality or value of a particular web page.

Expanding On Google’s PageRank Formula

Google loves any system that they can conceive to measure how much value the overall Internet community gives to a particular web page.

Google naturally treats links found in the Yahoo! Business Directory and the Open Directory as higher value links, because the search engineers at Google understand that links in these directories are all approved by a human being.

Google also gives extra value to social bookmarking websites, because the concept behind social bookmarking is that individuals “bookmark” a web page when they find that web page to offer good value to its readers.

Google openly dislikes paid links and can easily identify those paid links, without having to jump through too many hoops. (This should not be confused with paying for a service that will help you increase your rankings in Google. Paying a service provider to provide services to you is very different than just paying for links on high PageRank web pages.)

Google also appreciates reprint articles that have a Linking Portfolio beyond the article directories. Once again, Google appreciates reprint articles that are shown to provide real value to individuals in the greater Internet community.

When you take a close look at the original premise of Google’s PageRank, it has always been about creating systems that measure the value of a web pages to find which web pages will best answer a searcher’s question. Rightfully so, Google believes that the best way to ensure that they are able to give their users good quality search results is to look at what web pages others have already deemed useful.

Herein rests the secret to ranking well in Google’s search results. If you can create content that people will find useful, interesting, and valuable to others, then Google’s search algorithms will look favorably upon your website.

Author’s Note - This article was originally published at: karmaseo.com

About The Author

Bill Platt has written about SEO and article marketing for a number of years. As the owner of (LinksAndTraffic.com Bill has also been providing search engine optimization services to his clients for a number of years. If you are currently spending at least $1000 per month on pay-per-click search advertising, you owe it to yourself to review and consider Bill’s Performance Based SEO Service at: linksandtraffic.com/seo-services/search-marketing.html