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.

I had someone ask me why I had removed the Self Improvement and Health & Healing posts/products from the site, so I figured if one person is asking, there are probably more that are wondering, so here my answer. 

The main reason is that I want GamblerMan.com to be focused exclusively on Internet and Affiliate marketing. That was the number one idea when I created it in the first place.

Indeed, I have plenty to say and post regarding self improvement, health, healing, meditation, energy work, etc. etc., but I felt that trying to combine them all in one blog was just not going to do any of them justice. With that in mind, I pulled the non-marketing posts and will be creating a new blog page at my current psychic healing site: Tolemac.net

It just makes more sense to have them separated than to have it all jumbled together. Plus, I can then also separate the traffic I get for marketing from traffic for the self improvement, et al site.

Once I have the blog page set up over at Tolemac.net, I’ll post here with the link and let you all know it’s ready.

EDIT: ‘Tis ready. Come visit and leave a comment. http://tolemac.net/blog

Before you can begin to utilize any SEO on your site, you have to decide what your page is going to be about. This may seem unneccesary at first, but if you just throw up a bunch of topics and niches onto the site, it’s not going to do well at all with the search engines, and you’ll not get nearly the amount of traffic you want to see.

So, you’ll have to decide what topics you are interested in writing about, then also decide which of those topics you’ve got some knowledge on. This second is not mandatory, but it certainly helps your writing, and in setting up your site, if you know something about the subject at hand. Sure, you can look the information up, or have it ghost-written, but then it’s not coming from you. It won’t have your “flavor” and character on it. Let’s use myself as an example. I was in the casino business for 8 years as a dealer and as a Pitboss, so I know what I’m talking about if I write about gaming, gambling, casinos, living in Las Vegas, etc. I’ve been there and done that and have alot of valuable experience. (And the T-Shirt!)

The idea here is that I’m coming from a place of understanding and experience. I can answer any questions anyone has about that topic. Again, while it’s not mandatory that you have as much experience in your chosen niche as I do in Gambling, it certainly helps quite a bit when you are trying to get a point across, or when you are trying to sell something. After all, my assumption is you are here to learn how to use SEO techniques in order to improve your traffic to get more sales.

Unless you are strictly into a niche that does not have a product (is there really such a thing??), and you just want the increased traffic to get more visitors commenting on your site, then your focus needs to be on what you know about the niche you are selling in, OR where you can get this information. Let’s talk about that second one for a moment. Back in the day, I used to work for a large chain grocery store as a “courtesy clerk” (read – bagger, stocker and cart retriever). When I first started working there, of course I was not familiar with the layout of the store and where everything was. So a customer would ask, “Where’s the pickles?” and I’d say that I wasn’t sure, but let me find out for you. I’d then go get another employee, and ask what aisle are the pickles on, get the info and go back to the customer and take them to that aisle and show them the pickles.

Now this did a couple of things. First, I made a great impression with the customer, because I didn’t brush them off, or shovel them off to someone else, and I learned what aisle the pickles were on and by taking them there myself, I saw what else was on that aisle. You see, it’s all about knowledge and information. If you have these things in your niche, people will come to you for that, and more importantly, they’ll buy from you because you’ve built up their trust in you that you know what you’re doing and/or talking about. Remember that one. It’s important.

Once you’ve decided what niche you are going to pursue, you need to make a decision as to how you are going to accomplish this. Basically, you have two choices. One is to create your own webpage, with all the html/php/asp/java code involved and sort out the table structure, page layout, etc. For some of you, that’s not a big deal. For the rest of you… well the term “nightmare” comes to mind. I’ve done it myself, so I know fully what’s involved, which is why I chose option 2. Install a Wordpress site. Wordpress makes life a whole lot simpler when it comes to building your own site. You still have to know some tech stuff like how to use FTP and how to set up MySQL on your server, but it’s not nearly the chore building it from scratch is.

Of course, if you are a total non-geek (my sincere condolences) you can always hire someone to create the site for you based on your specs. For myself, I like getting into things and knowing how it all works, so I don’t have a problem going either route, but using Wordpress is fast and easy, comparatively speaking.

In my next post, I’ll talk further about setting up and designing your site around your niche, and in particular, how using Wordpress is to your best SEO advantage.

There really are no mysteries on how to achieve a high ranking with the major search engines nowadays, mainly because of the amount of effective search engine optimizations available. What is search engine optimization, or SEO? Before we talk about that, you have to first understand how search engines work and give yourself a bit of know-how.

Search engines provide their users with the most relevant and current information that matches the search term that was used. They are an extremely sophisticated technology which allows users to quickly find the relevant information and websites by searching for a particular word or phrase. The results would be useless to users if the information didn’t relate to the search term, or if the results are not current. People expect the most current and the freshest information when doing a search query.

Updating your website at least once everyday and adding new material/information will help your site get noticed by the search engines. If you are going to sell any product or service online, you have to make sure you optimize your website for the search engines, which will boost traffic and sales. Because over 90% of your business will more than likely come from search engine results, you need your site optimized,  in order for you to have the best results possible.

SEO is the process wherein you or your webmaster utilizes certain techniques that enhance your website’s status. Obviously, the internet has grown vastly over the years and competition for the hottest search engine positions has created a tremendous market. Consequently, having a better understanding of the basic elements of SEO is crucial for any online business to achieve success.

When you use effective SEO techniques, it will improve the page rank of your website. While there are many tips & tricks that can be applied to increase your page rank; the most effective method, in my humble opinion, is to provide consistenly high quality content. This may seem like a simple idea at first, but there are a lot of websites that fail to provide any content that will attract visitors and that those visitors they do get, will find interesting. Sites that provide content that is interesting, well-written and updated on a regular basis, bring in visitors who are much more likely to return. So, set your website apart from the mob of boring, zombie-like sites, and you’ll bring in the traffic.

The next important factor for an effective SEO campaign, is to use keywords and phrases in your content that properly target your market. You must make sure that these keywords/phrases are the ones that your website is actually optimized for. The more keywords that you use in your content, the more likely it is that visitors will find your site when they do searches with those words. If you are consistant with these techniques, then the overall SEO will definitely increase, boosting your sites page rank.

Another method to consider is to develop a linking strategy. Not only does this provide totally free advertising for your site, it also gives the impression that your site is important and has good information because of its affiliated links. Each link pointing back to your site, is another chance for a potential customer to find you. Having more inbound links pointing to your site, means you will get ranked higher in the search engines. One thing to remember here is to gets links from sites that are related to yours. Getting a link from a baby care site to your golf instruction and apparel site will probably not get you any new visitors.

People who use search engines on the internet are looking for one thing: Information. When you provide them with quality and helpful information, the more likely you are to make a sale. Writing articles is one of the most effective ways to build up the quality content of your site. When writing these articles, make sure that you set up an easy way for your visitors to get to each article. You can do this by adding a new page for each article to your site, or by adding a specific category page where related articles can be found quickly. This allows room for more articles to be added as you write them, and it will help keep your main page clutter free. By building up an archive of articles, you bring in your visitors and give them a reason to stay on your page. The longer they stay and the more they read, the better chance you have of making a sale. You also want to make sure to include a link to these categorized articles on the main page of your site so that the search engines will crawl all your online articles.

SEO methods are important in building up your site’s rank and status. Remember, write high-quality, keyword rich content and link your site to and from a related group of other sites. In my next post, I’ll follow up with some more SEO specific strategies that are easy to implement.