SEO Basics

You need a thorough understanding of SEO basics in order to know how to promote your website successfully. SEO or search engine optimization includes all those techniques and strategies which will cause your webpage to achieve a high rank in the eyes of the most popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo etc. This is perhaps the most important factor in promoting your business because internet users typically visit the first few pages displayed in response to their search queries.

How to Promote your Website – Strategies relating to keywords and links

Search engines send out bots also known as spiders that crawl your webpage. There are several criteria which these spiders read to assign a rank to your page. Keywords by which you want your web site to be found and the links are the two most important criteria. Some strategies relating to these two factors are as follows:

• Find out which keyword you should concentrate upon, and in relation to which you want your website to be found. Use SEO research tools to find which keywords is most popular relating to your product. Feedbacks from current and past customers will also help you to identify the most effective keywords.
• Once you have identified the most relevant keyword, you have to use it effectively. Place the keyword at the title of each page and create hyperlinks for them. You can include descriptive Meta tags, rich in keywords, which appear in the search results. Make sure that it actually represents the contents of the page. One cardinal sin, which you must avoid, is to use keywords in such a way that search engines rank you high but it actually does not relate to the content of your webpage.
• Strategic use of keywords in the headers, first paragraph and hyperlinks are some of the SEO basics.
• Links are very important to when it comes to understanding how to promote your website. Create easily navigable high quality links. The interior linking of your site should be smooth and high. Do not direct all your links to the homepage. If you have a large site, a sitemap will prove helpful.
• In order to build effective links, you should submit your business to web directories and trade organization sites. Participate actively in the social media and create rich contents which will attract external links. You can try for link exchange with relevant sites of high quality.

How to Promote your Website – Other Strategies to Promote your Website

Apart from links and keywords, there are many SEO basics which, if applied correctly, are sure to increase the traffic to your website. These are:

• You should try to establish a strong brand name. This is because searches with specific reference to brand names are focused and are most likely to lead to sale of your wares.
• Your website and your product need to be highly visible. In order to promote your website, take active and intelligent part in relevant discussions in social media like Facebook and YouTube. If you manage to achieve a high visibility in such sites, you will get a temporary but high concentration of visitors to your site.
• Use emails, viral marketing, auction sites, pay-per-click advertisements as well as the traditional media to promote your website.

The above SEO basics should all be thoroughly prepared and applied strategically to promote your website.

How to promote your Website by SEOBasicsx.com

Natural search engine optimization services also referred to as organic SEO services means ranking a page in the search results without paying for it. When you perform a search in the search engine, the pages returned are presented in order of relevance according to the search engine, normally, to the right hand side and across the top is another list of results, these are paid listings, sites that pay the search engine to be there. Using organic SEO services we are optimizing our website to appear in the top results without paying the search engines.

Methods Used by Organic SEO Services

Nothing is difficult if you have the time, skills and the knowledge; the same applies to natural SEO. It is no secret that the structure and layout play a key role but also quality content that other websites will link to and effectively vote for pages is the most important. This alone will help a great deal in achieving higher rankings without paying a penny.

Content

As modern day search engines evolve, content is proving to be more and more valued, basically the more of it the better and the better quality the better. More content does two main things:

1. Relevance.

Having more content on your pages signals to the search engines the relevancy of your page, it will naturally contain more LSI keyword. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing and is a term that is widely used in the SEO world. That is exactly what is happening here, this written article is about SEO and by including terms like LSI, it shows the search engines that the content is more relevant to SEO. Incorporating more content within your pages also helps the page to found for many other words other than the ones you were optimizing it for.

1. Engages the Visitor

The more time a visitor spends on your page the better, not only does it reduce page bounce, but by engaging your visitor with rich content they are likely to bookmark the site which gives a valuable backlink and also other website will link to your site as a reference effectively giving it a vote, which says to the search engines that your page is important and therefor will be ranked higher.

Outsourcing Organic SEO Services

A good organic SEO company should cover many aspects and by knowing what these are you can make an informed choice of who you use. There are two main categories of organic SEO services and these are classed as On-page and off-page:

On-page elements are:

1. Content layout and keyword placement, each page of your site should be optimized for at least one keyword. This means placing your keyword in the right Meta tags, headings, description and making sure that they make up a percentage of the content.
2. Internal linking. The way your content is linked within your site has big impact on relevancy.

Off-page elements are:

1. Backlinks, these are other sites on the web linking to your site, normally in the form of clickable text that takes you to your website. These are made up of forum profile and comments, RSS feeds, website directories, blogs, press releases, social media sites, bookmarking sites and websites that are relevant to your topic.

Anyone carrying out organic SEO services for you should be doing at the very least all of the above things, if they are not then it is advisable to look elsewhere as these are the SEO basics and should be the minimum services performed on your site if you want it to be ranked highly in the search engines.

A few weeks ago we talked about how to start a website using a Word Press hosted blog. We went over in a little detail how to choose a name, register a free account and getting your first website live using the standard twenty eleven theme.

This week I will walk you through adding some content in the form of posts and pages.

Let’s first look at getting some content on your website and adding some standard pages. Within WordPress you have many different options to display written content but to keep things simple we will concentrate on the main two which are posts and pages. Also it is best to get some content on your site before we change the theme, that way we will have more of an idea of how our site is going to look and feel, then we can choose a theme to suit.

How to Start a Website: Posts and Pages

Posts are normally shorter than pages and are displayed or posted to the home page and are displayed in date order normally with most recent shown at the top, Posts are used to post news and topics that change on a regular basis.

Pages are different to posts whereby they are displayed on their own page and are static. As an example your website may be about precious metals so you would have pages about gold, pages about silver and pages about platinum etc then on the home page we would have posts that get updated with what is going on in the precious metals markets. Gold will always be gold just like a page will always be a page but the markets will change and then so will the posts.

Today we will create one page, a post and we will also add an about me page. An about me page is always good to have on a website especially if it is a privately owned website, it just makes it more real and not like robot has made the site. We will also create a privacy policy page as well, but we can use a plug in for that so we will leave it for next week when I can explain in more detail.

How to Start a Website: First Post

Ok so head on over to Word Press and enter your username and password that you wrote down somewhere safe, and then at the top in dark grey find the word blogs, in the drop down menu find your website name and select dashboard. In the centre of the page you should see a box that says “right now”. Click on the word “post/s” in blue. You should have one post already there which is the default post called Hello World, you can either delete this post or create a new one. Let’s leave that one and start a new one, we can come back to it later and delete it.

Next to the word Post is a button that says “Add New” hit that button and a new post page will open up. In the first box at the top enter in the title of what you want to post, “How to start a website: My first post”. You can write whatever you like here but it is best if it is relevant to what the post is about.

In the next box below is where we will add our main body of our post, to the top right hand side there is two tabs, VISUAL and HTML if you don’t know how to start a website then it is best that you stick to the visual tab until you learn a bit about html. Visual just means that what you put into the box is what will be displayed on the website. The WordPress platform is very powerful and can do many things but here we will just stick to the basics. To the left hand side at the top there is the upload/insert buttons these are for uploading pictures, videos, audio, media, polls and custom uploads. Feel free to play around with these to see how it affects your post. Below that are the word processing controls just like you get in Microsoft Word like underline, bold, bullet points, text alignment etc again feel free to play around and see what each one does, remember you can always delete the post.

Start adding your content, tell the world what you want to say. You can either paste your content from a word file, to do this find the button furthest to the right in the word processing controls called show/hide kitchen sink hit that and you should see a button with a little clip board with a W on it press that and paste your text from word into the box and hit insert. You can do the same thing when copying from note pad. All this does is stop any format complications between WordPress and your text. If you would like you can simply type the text straight into the box.

That’s it, when you are happy with way everything looks then hit the blue publish button to the right of the page to publish your first post. If you need to see what it looks like, how it fits in with the theme while you are still editing then at the very top of the page is a W in a circle (the WordPress Logo) and next to it is the name of your site, right click it and select open in a new tab, there you go your first post. Now you can switch between editing and your live post just remember to refresh the page on your browser to see any changes you make.

When you first read this you didn’t know how to start a website now you have published your first post.

The only thing that is guaranteed when it comes to search engine optimization and Google is that nothing is guaranteed, even the best natural search engine optimization techniques cannot promise lasting results. Anyone that works in the world of internet marketing and SEO knows this, but it is those same pushy marketers that try to sell you search engine optimization packages that guarantee results. If it was that easy to get to the top of the search engines then these people wouldn’t be selling their services to the public and other businesses they would making enough money by having lots of web pages in the number one position themselves.

I’m not talking about real seo companies that carry out website optimization for real businesses like the local tailor that wants to get more people through the door, but more about the type of companies that claim to get “work at home mom’s” website on the first page of Google for the term “how to lose weight fast” in less than a month guaranteed!

“How to lose weight fast” gets plugged into Google’s search box 350,000 times per month globally, that’s 4.2 million times a year. Now if you occupied number one position for that term you could realistically expect around 60 per cent of that traffic, the rest will click on the ads and the other results, so that’s about 2.5 million visitors a year. Now imagine that you had signed up to Google’s adsense and had ads on your pages and you pay per click was $0.50 and your click through rate (the percentage of people that click on the ads) was 1 per cent which is a very conservative amount. One per cent of 2.5 million is 250,000 times that by fifty cents that is a nice $125,000 per year and that is probably the least profitable way to monetize the site and traffic. The web pages that currently occupy the top 3 spots for that term have probably been there for a few years have a gazillion links pointing to them. There is no way that Mr Guaranteed page one for $300 is going to knock them off.

Some keywords and search phrases on the other hand are easy to get top spot for like “tailor in Gettysburg” but again they are not guaranteed as someone with a little more knowledge of the basics of seo can come along and take that first position.

Big money terms like the one above have a power that cannot be brought and that is just what Google is looking for, natural search engine optimization, when pages of a site have reputation they get linked to naturally, they get talked about, and they create a buzz. The big G see this and that’s why they have the top positions.

Don’t get fooled into believing that Mr Guaranteed search engine optimization can get your site to page one in two weeks because if he can it will be one of two things either the keyword your page is number one for has no traffic or it will get to the first page for a week then it will disappear back down the rankings. Sometimes just good, fresh and original content with good on-page seo is enough to get to the first page but it won’t stay there. Google will sometimes put new content high in the rankings due to QDF Query deserves freshness, which is basically new fresh content can sometimes get a boost but after a while it will slip back down if it doesn’t get the reputation, the back links and the buzz.

SEO takes time and if you want your pages to be on page one or even better number one for a term that has enough traffic to monetize then the only lasting and real way to do it is natural search engine optimization and reputation.

I have seen some pretty cool website designs during my time online as a casual browser and more recently as a business user. The last few years though the internet has moved on leaps and bounds with websites becoming move visually appealing and turning more into works of art, a place for individuals and companies to show their design talents. It was only a few years ago that just a hand full of websites were at the cutting edge of design, now these days it easier for people to use the many available options to show their design skills by using easy to use software or online blogging platforms to create some cool website designs.

Leaving the SEO basics on the table and concentrating purely on the design and having a chance to exhibit your creative mind on to the digital canvas of the internet is just another way of expressing yourself in this technology driven world in which we live in.

Cool Website Designs – Art

The world wide web changes so fast, what is in fashion, popular, liked and loved by the masses today is forgotten about tomorrow but I guess that is what keeps everyone so engrossed in the internet, its ever changing and evolving miss mash of art and functionality intertwined into a beautiful part of our day to day lives.

Some of the coolest website designs of the last few years have mainly been in the music, art and photography industries. One big name that comes to mind in the music, art and photography industry is Apple. They took the computer away from the Geeks and nerds and put it in the hands of the design savvy while also being an inspiration themselves by designing some of the most beautiful and innovative electronics to date.

Another giant that has changed the face of the internet in a design sense is Adobe with powerhouse software such as photo shop, dream weaver and the animated graphics platform Flash has made developing beautiful and entrancing webpages simple.

Award Winning Web Design Companies

Obviously not everyone can afford all the expensive software to produce the kind of websites that win awards and not everyone has the artistic mind to come up with these amazing ideas for flash style websites, but web development company’s do, that’s what they get paid for.

Before you go parting with your hard earned money to some dodgy web building company think about a few things first. Like:

• Have a good idea of the type and function of your site to explain to the web developer
• Make sure that you have market for your site
• Make sure that you have an SEO plan in place
• Ask to see live samples of some of their work, speak to the owners of the site if you can.
• Always remember that the internet trends, by that I mean what is cool this week may not be cool next week.

Cool Website Designs – DIY

Last of all, if this is your first time venturing into the online world then you should seriously consider putting together a site yourself, there is a page and many posts detailing how on this site and many others. It really is very easy to start building your own sites, I’m sure that anyone could learn how to build a site and have one live in a day and with all the free templates available you can have some pretty cool website designs.

Last week we talked about keywords and their importance in SEO basics. This week we will delve a bit deeper into the placement of keywords within the content on our site and various on-page SEO that really should be performed on our sites if they are to have any chance of reaching that all important first page.

The single most important place to have your keywords is in your domain name, whether that is your home page, an internal page or post page. It is a lot easier to optimize for one keyword per page than it is for many to begin with, after a while your pages will be found for many different keyword phrases and by using some free analysis tools like Google analytics and webmaster tools we can see which keywords our pages are being found for and converting into sales, and then by using some off page SEO basics we can bring our pages up the rankings for those particular keywords. To start with it is best to focus our SEO efforts on one keyword phrase per page, post or home page and as I said the most effective place for those keywords is in the domain name. I am sitting in Jo-burg airport writing this waiting for a connecting flight, I have just ordered a slice of cake while thinking of an example for a domain name. Let’s say that your site is about South African Cakes. Your domain for the home page would be South African cakes.com and say one of your pages was about the delicious cheesecake I’ve just eaten then the domain for that page would be: South African cakes .com/South-African-cheesecake. By having our keywords in the name of our pages immediately tells Google and more importantly our readers what our pages are about.

Title and headings

Your keywords should also appear in the title and the headings of the page that you’re optimizing, if you are using word press or any WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style platform for building your website then the page or post has a box for entering your title. If you are using an html editor to build your site then the title needs to go between the title tags. They look like this <title> South African Cheesecake </title>. Your title doesn’t have to be just your keyword as long as it includes your keyword. The next thing we should include our keyword in is our headings these are in html h1, h2, h3 and h4. In word press these are in the font size options heading 1, heading 2 etc. Now in most cases it is only important for the SEO basics to use the h1 tag but using the h2 and h3 tags as well can only reinforce the power of your keyword. The same thing goes for the headings as long as they include your keyword, so it might be <h1>My First Taste of South African Cheesecake<h1>.

Description Tag

Including your keyword in the description is something that many website owners very rarely do and if you do then you will have an immediate advantage over your competition. Not only does this give you the chance to explain in more detail what your site is about to the Google spiders but also to give you’re potential readers an attention grabbing line of text for them to click on when they see it in the search engine rankings. The same thing as with the title and headings, if you’re using WYSIWYG then just enter your description in the description box and if your using html then it is a little more complicated than before as we will be using a meta tag:

<meta name=”description” content=”Your description here” />

Your description going between the quotation marks after content.

SEO Basics

These are the three most important places to use your keywords for your home page, internal pages or even your posts. If you were to follow this for your own site then you would be more optimized than around 90 per cent of the websites online today. A quick check using my favourite free tool Traffic Travis, type any popular keyword phrase into the SEO analyses section and you will see which pages have the keyword in the title, h1 and description and depending on the market; you’ll see that most of the sites in the top ten don’t even have the keyword in these areas. Now imagine your site has similar off page SEO as your competition but you have your keywords in the right places then yours pages will come out on top every time. Taking the time to gain a small amount of knowledge on SEO basics can give you a big advantage.

How many websites are ranking at the number one position using only natural search engine optimization? When I say natural search engine optimization I mean, their owners have not done any work on their sites at all, they have just produced very good content and over time people have recognized the quality and linked to it in some form or another. My guess and a very educated guess I might say, is probably anywhere in the region of none. Anyone who builds a website whether that is an individual like you and I or a company, wants the site, they have spent time and effort working to be seen. Even if we only carry out the essential on-page SEO basics then that is, at minimum, still manipulating the search engine rankings in our favour.  Isn’t that what SEO is all about? Yes, but there is right ways to do things and wrong ways in an ethical sense.

SEO Basics | Keeping Your Head Warm

You will often hear in internet marketing circles, terms like white hat, black hat and grey hat so what exactly are these hats and which one should we be wearing? Normally that would depend a lot on the colour of your shirt and shoes but in this case it depends on your morals. The different colour hats represent the way in which you or the company you are paying to carry out the search engine optimization on your site. White is the cleanest and morally correct way, through to black being classed as completely breaking the rules, and then grey merely bending them slightly. Let’s break them down into a little more detail.

SEO Basics | White Hat

As I said above white hat SEO is completely organic and comes from people or sites naturally linking to your content, over a very long time these links build up in turn the pages in the site move up in the search engine rankings. More and more people like your site/pages and a snowball effect starts, and then sooner or later your site is getting closer to the top spot for a few keywords. Really though for this to happen, not only do you need to be very patient, your site has to be full of extremely good content even controversial, something that gets people talking. This is the SEO basics of what is known as white hat SEO and the sort of search engine optimization that Google encourages.

SEO Basics | Grey Hat

Grey hat SEO is what 90% of the community practice and along with the on-page SEO basics as outlined in Google’s SEO guide, like using your keywords in the title, description and heading tags. Grey hat is more centred on the way links are built to your site, whereas with white hat, link building happens naturally, with grey hat, the links are purposely made with a view to increase the site position in the search engine rankings. How you set about building links to your site is up to you, there is certainly nothing illegal about using grey hat techniques and I’m quite sure that you won’t go to prison for it. Will it or can it harm your site? At the moment the only thing I have seen is if you build too many links to a new site then it can seem unnatural to Google and I have seen sites drop from an initially good position for a new site to going completely off the chart, could this be Google punishing the site aka “sandbox”?  This is a common debate in many internet marketing forums at the moment. One thing we can be sure of is building thousands of links to an already established site cannot do it any harm, if it could then we could simply build thousands of links to our competitors sites and one by one knock them out of the rankings until we are left at the number one position.  Obviously Google is not going to allow that. I would suggest that on a new site you get the on page SEO basics right and then start building links gradually until the site has matured and then step up the link building.

SEO Basics | Black hat

Black hat SEO is like cheating the system, using underhand techniques to try to manipulate your way to the top of the search engines. This is short term thinking, if you are trying to build an online presence using SEO then your plan should be genuine and long term. Google is always changing the calculations they use determine where they position a site and they are doing it to give their customers the best possible results. They don’t what to show spam sites any more than we want to see them. Using white hat or the whiter side grey hat methods will always give you a better chance of a long term successful business than trying to cheat your way to the top. If you can get there and stay there then the rewards will be so large that they will pay for all the hard work and patience ten times over.

SEO Basics | Black Hat Techniques

Some examples of black hat techniques are:

Keyword stuffing, this is over using the keyword that your trying to rank for, to the point where the text is unreadable. Do not confuse this with good on page SEO basics. Keyword density should be around one to two per cent and to the reader be undetectable.

Invisible text, this is colouring the text on the page the same colour as the back ground in order to trick the search engine spiders into thinking there is more keywords on that page than there really is.

This kind of search engine trickery does not work for long, if it works at all. At the end of the day wear a light grey hat that is closer to white, stick to the SEO basics and reap the rewards long term.

SEO Basics

Trying to keep up with how Google works can be hard work and if you are new to this game, then it could be very frustrating, especially when the big G decides your site is no longer worthy of its position in the search engine rankings. The next thing you know all that free traffic you were getting is gone.  You could be doing everything right as far as you know and then bang, that steady flow of traffic has turned into a trickle. Whether you had your SEO basics in perfect order or not, if you don’t play by Google’s rules then there is a good chance you’ll get punished.

SEO Basics | A Change is Going to Come

Google makes slight changes to the search and placement algorithms it uses all the time, this is to combat spam and to try and stop people playing the system. Another clever and I would say naturally accruing thing that holds back the spam sites is the fact that any changes you make to your site, like backlinks or the on-page SEO basics, can take a long time to register. If we placed a link on site-A linking back to our site then Google would have to crawl that page to see the new link and then calculate the importance of that link before making any changes to our sites/pages position. This could take months, so it makes it nearly impossible to measure. I read somewhere that Google looks at around one hundred different variables to determine where it places a page in the rankings. With these variables changing all the time, it makes it impossible to measure exactly what you’re doing and the results it is producing. That being said, a few SEO basics have been proven to make a big difference time and time again.

SEO Basics | Poor Quality Content

Why would any of Google’s customers want to read poor quality content? Why would any of Google customers want to read (try to read) badly spun content?  What would you do if you were searching for something and through Google and you landed on page where the content didn’t make any sense? I would just hit the back button and look for something else. If I type something into Google, then I want Google to give me good quality relevant results not a load of spam garbage. This is exactly what Google strives to do and that is exactly what they were trying to achieve with the last major algorithm change.

SEO Basics | Stick to the Rules

Back in the last week of February Google made one of the biggest changes to its search algorithms to date. If you were unfortunate enough to have bent the rules slightly with the quality of your content then your site or your articles may have been dropped in the search engine rankings or worse completely disappeared. Ezine Articles was hit heavily and as a result they are now very strict on approving articles. Auto blogs, content farms and small websites with weak content were also hit hard. What can we learn from this? The first thing is, you should never have all your eggs in one basket and by that I mean; if the internet is your main source of income or you would like it to be, then spread out your business don’t just rely on SEO and Google. As this site is called SEO Basics then I will give the rules to stick to, to make sure that no matter what Google does then you’ll always have a good chance of staying in the big G’s good books.

SEO Basics Rules for Keeping Google Happy

First and foremost, use your best content on your site and DON’T reproduce it anywhere else until it has been fully indexed on your site. Google doesn’t punish duplicate content; it just won’t show it in the search results. What I mean is, this article that you’re reading now (once I have finished writing it) will be published on this site, then once Google has indexed it I can then take it and publish it in an article directory. Google has already seen that this one was the original and so when some searches for one of my keywords they will find this page and not the article in the directory. I will get visitors from the article directory though because they will find it surfing around the article directory. The main lesson here is writing the best content you can for your site, give you readers what they are looking for and not some rehashed garbage that doesn’t make sense.

Make sure your site has all the Pages required for which you choose to monetising your site. The main page to have is a privacy policy page and if you are selling affiliate products then you need to also have an affiliate disclosure page. A contact page will look good to Google as it proves that you not hiding from anyone.

Good quality, user friendly, interesting content that your readers want to link to. Add to that some well-organized SEO basics and Google will love you for it.

SEO basics Team.

A few years ago I didn’t know the first thing about how to start a website; I thought that you needed to either know how to programme or pay someone to build a site for you. Neither of these points is correct but if you know a little about programming then that can be a help. Of course if you have money to burn then you can pay someone to build you a site and if you don’t like it then you can pay them to do it again. Not really a practical way to go. Luckily as the World Wide Web has grown and aged it is now possible for anyone with a little patience to put together a small website in an afternoon.

SEO Basics | Blogging

A blog which as I am sure you have heard of is like a website but normal looked after by one person and is updated on a regular basis. The actual name blog has come from name web and log and has become increasingly popular over the last 10 years, to the point now where a good percentage of the websites built today are based on a blogging platform. Blogs can also be interactive with their readers by allowing them to leave comments and opinions on the original article. The great thing about most blog platforms todays is that they are very easy to set up and are normally free. Anyone looking into starting a website should look no further than word press to build their site on. It is so easy to use, to set up and there is literally thousands of plugins designed to make life even easier for us, some will take care of things like the seo basics of our page layouts others will automatically create site maps for us every time we post new content to let google know about the changes.

Seo Basics | Word Press

Ok before I overwhelm you with information on plugins and all the wonderful things they can do, let’s have a look at the first steps involved in setting up our first word press site.

Head on over to wordpress.com and hit the ‘Get Started Here’ button. The first thing you will be asked for is to create a blog address.

Before we do anything here I just want to go over a few things on domain names, blog addresses, website names or whatever you know them as. The official technical term is ‘Domain name’ and that is the address that you put in to your browser like http:// myblog . com or http://www. Myblog.com etc. Now what I’m about to share with you can have a huge influence on search engine optimization and it should one of the first things you learn about in SEO basics. EMD stands for Exact Match Domain, and what does this mean? Let’s say that your site is about inflatable dart boards, when someone searches for ‘inflatable dart boards’ ideally you want your site to be on the first page of the search results. If you purchase the name inflatabledartboards.com then just because you have the keyword (search term) in your domain name then you will already have a head start in SEO. Many of the most popular EMD’s are gone but there is ways of getting around that, just take a quick look at the domain name of this site for a hint. Fortunately today we are going to keep things simple and use word press’s own domain names as these are free and there is many left to choose from, this is because they end in,  .wordpress.com and not just .com, so it would be inflatabledartboards.wordpress.com.  Before you choose your blog name put your SEO basics hat on and take your time to think of what you want your site to found for. There are many different way to come up with a name which include market research and keyword analyses, but again this will be saved for a future post.

Enter your chosen domain name in, then choose a username and password, enter your email address. Before you press the ‘Create your blog’ button open up word pad and copy and paste all the details in there and safe it somewhere where you can find it. This is important and a habit I recommend that you start doing now. Keep a record of everything you do, all your passwords and site names.

Ok once you have done that press the ‘create your blog’ button and then head on over to your email and confirm the account.

Well done you have just created your first website……….. Easy…!

If you want to see what it looks like then at the top left hand side you should see the word press logo a blue little circle with a “W ” in it and your site name next to it. Click that and your first site will open up.

Well I bet you didn’t think it would be that easy. Well in the next post we will move onto choosing a theme and getting the look you want.

SEO BASICS

Cool website designs, are they essential to seo basics? Definitely not..! You don’t need to search for long to find that even the ugliest websites ranking high and sometimes for very competitive keywords. Though first of all we should define the word; cool because by my standards, if my website is ranking highly within the search engines then that is pretty cool …… Regardless of how it looks, but when someone says the term “cool website designs” the first thing that comes to mind is the way the website looks and functions, not it’s a cool website because it has the seo basics handled…

Well I was just about to take a description of “cool” from the Oxford English Dictionary which I hope you agree is the only official dictionary of the English language but something not cool happened you have to pay a subscription fee! Dictionary.com it is then.

If you’re interested the description, it’s huge, here is the linkhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Cool

I think we would all agree that a cool website means a website that is special or individual in the way it looks and also the way it functions.

SEO Basics | Quality Content

Many things go into search engine optimization and many of them are as important as one another, but if you learn anything from seo basics then it’s that quality content always wins. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur and are thinking about starting out online, then you must first understand that giving value to your readers, customers is the most important thing. If you can get good quality original content on the web then it will get found. Remember Google rewards quality. Many people starting out online think that you can just through a website together, copy someone else’s crappy content and start making money, it is not going to happen!

The main reason that a cool website design can make a big difference to how well your site performs in the search engines is one thing…… User experience! Google and other analytical sites monitor how various visitors behave on our web pages. Let’s say for instance that a visitor lands on your site from Google, takes one look at your site and immediately hits the back button and land back on the Google search page, what does that tell Google…? Exactly that Google hasn’t given the visitor the page that he or she was looking for. This needs to occur a good percentage of times for the search engine to down grade your site for a specific keyword. This is known as bounce rate, a high bounce rate is bad and low one is good.

If you can capture the attention of your readers with an original, easy on the eye, easy to navigate web page then the chances are that you will have a low bounce rate and cool website design.

Seo Basics | The Recipe

Get yourself one large bowl of determination, mix together some well researched keywords with a load of quality content, pour on some cool website designs, and spend the next 3 months adding a sprinkle of backlinks. You should be on your way to a successful website. This is just the seo basics.

Keywords form the spine of search engine optimization and should be the first thing you learn about in seo basics. They perform the most important role in search engine optimization and they are literally the keys to the pages within your site. On page they are like the DNA of your content, informing the search engines of what the content is about. Off page they play an even more important role of being used as the anchor text to a link to the web page, again to inform the search engines of what the site is about that the link is pointing to.

When your site is new, Google will send out its spiders to crawl your pages, they literally run over everything on the pages, photos, videos, the text, graphics and links and what they do is make up a picture of what your page is about and store it in Google’s memory. They will take into account many things, like the amount of time words are repeated, the names of your pictures and the description of your site. This will tell Google or any other search engine what that page is about. Once it knows what your page is about it can then show it in the results for the keyword terms it thinks are relevant to the page.

You see then, just how important it is to optimize the pages within our site for specific keywords that we want to be found for.

One thing you must remember in seo basics is that the search engines show pages not sites.

How do we optimize our pages then for specific keywords? Nobody knows for sure the exact algorithms that the search engines use but over the years we found out roughly what works, gives us the best results and more importantly doesn’t do our sites any harm.

On Page SEO Basics keyword placement

The first thing we need to do is make sure that our “keyword density” the amount of times the keyword that we want our page to be found for, is repeated. This should be around 1 to 3% any more than that and the text doesn’t read naturally, even at 2-3% sometimes it doesn’t sound right. Remember the most important thing is to give quality content to your readers. The keyword density can be increased by using the keyword to name your images.

Second is to include our keyword in the page title. This is very important. One of the very first websites I built had 20 pages and instead of publishing each page after I had written it, I gave each page a title, which was the keyword I wanted each page to be optimize for. I then published the page and intended to add the content as and when I was ready. Well I ended up adding about 6 or 7 pages then realized that I had researched my keyword wrong and gave up on the site. It was only a couple of months ago that I checked on site and wow I was surprised, many of the pages were on the first page of Google for their respective keywords. And guess what some of those pages had no content at all just the page title which was the keyword……… Admittedly the keyword had very low competition and was not searched for that often, that’s was why I decided to give up on the site, But it goes to prove that having your keyword in the title is very powerful.

See you in Seo Basics Part 2 next week.