1. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

3.  Search Engine Optimization refers to the
collection of techniques and practices that
allow a site to get more traffic from search
engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). SEO can be
divided into two main areas: off-page SEO
(work that takes place separate from the
website) and on-page SEO (website changes to
make your website rank better). This tutorial
will cover both areas in detail! Remember, a
website is not fully optimized for search
engines unless it employs both on and off-page
SEO.

5.  Before you can start optimizing your site for
the search engines, you must first know which
terms you want to target. A good start would
be to choose 3 or 4 keywords you would like
your website to rank well for. With these
keywords in your mind you can then set a goal
to rank in the top 10 results on Google for each
of them (we refer to Google because if you can
rank well there, you'll rank well on the other
search engines). These keywords can be either
broad or specific, but you'll want to study our
list of pros and cons of each before choosing.

6.  A broad keyword is one that many people
search for, because they may only have a vague
idea of what they're looking for. Broad
keywords tend to be very short and aren't very
specific (e.g. "shoes" or "sports"). These
keywords are difficult to rank #1 for because so
many other websites might have an article or
two that mention shoes. However, if you can
rank well for a broad keyword, you will be
receiving a great deal of traffic.

7.  A specific keyword is something that contains
many adjectives or words that make the search
very targeted. The people doing these types of
searches know exactly what they want (e.g.
"used black high heel shoes"). These keywords
are much less competitive and are easier to
rank for on search engines. The downside is
that they receive a great deal less volume of
searches per month. In terms of traffic, you will
need to have several #1 rankings for specific
keywords to equal one #1 ranking broad
keyword.

8.  These are the words that are specific to only
your company. They are one of the most easiest
ways to get traffic. However, some companies
will release a new product, with a unique
name, and then forget to optimize for that
keyword on their website. Their SEO savvy
competitors can then pick up the slack and take
over the top rankings for these terms. If you
have a popular brand or product, make sure
that you have optimized for
these freebie keywords.

9.  Keyword research tools are 2 parts voodoo
magic and 1 part hard statistic. This is partly
due to Google not releasing actual numbers
and partly due to overeager SEO Tool
developers trying to sell their products.
Because there is such a sizable uncertainty in
all keyword research tools, it is best to use as
many different sources as you can,. Even with
multiple sources, you should only take the
information you gather as a recommendation,
rather than a fact.

10.  To put the optimizing tactics that we teach to good
use, we recommend that you try to target no more
than 2 or 3 keyword phrases per page. A common
mistake by many SEO beginners is to stuff 500
different keywords on one page and wait for the
#1 rankings to roll in. That might have worked 10
years ago, but the algorithms that search engines
use these days are much more sophisticated and
are not tricked by this. That's why it's best to start
small, and be concise with the keywords that you
choose. New sites in particular will find it nearly
impossible to rank well for many keyword phrases
upon first starting out.

12.  Although some SEOs will talk about aiming for an
exact proportion (e.g. the number of times your
keyword appears divided by the total number of
words on the page), it's a little too much work for
something that will take care of itself as long as
you know how to write well! Use your keyword
frequently on your site, but not so much that it
makes the page look weird or a sentence sound
awkward. If you just use the keyword once at the
top of the page and then reference the keyword as
"it", for the rest of the article, you'll definitely be
using it too little.

13.  You may have found a couple of high traffic
keywords using a keyword research tool, but
those estimates often group similar keywords,
alternate spellings, and plurals into a single
word. Valuable traffic is hidden when using
those tools. This hidden traffic lies in all the
subtle variations of your keyword

14.  If you're making a page to target "big hats,"
consider changing up the adjective "big" to its
synonyms, like "huge," "giant," "large,"
"humongous," or "oversized." You can also use
the names of specific words that relate to "big
hats," like "cowboy hat" and "sombrero." By
using this tactic, you give yourself a chance to
rank for those similar keywords, plus you let
the search engines know more about your page
and what it's about. The more a search engine
knows about your page, the better off you're
going to be!

15.  he first and most important part of your on-
page SEO is the title tag (<title></title>). Many
people who outsource or create a site in a
WYSIWYG editor completely forget about the
last of the meta tags that still gives some
quality ranking love from search engines.

16.  Search engine optimization isn't just about
showing up number one on search engines.
Rather, it's about getting the all the traffic that
you deserve from the search engines. If you
rank #6 for "free hats" and you and your
competitors forget to include that in the
page's title tag, chances are, the person doing
the search won't see much difference between
your site and the others.

17.  All too often, people believe that the title tag is
a place to list the business and domain name of
the website. This is wrong and is wasting one
of the easiest ways you can tell the search
engines what the a page is about and how they
should categorize it. While humans might not
notice the title tag, search engines certainly do.

19.  The honest fact is, if company owners knew
how important that the internal linking
structure of a site was to a site's performance
on the search engines, they'd have multiple
dedicated staff working just to make sure they
had it optimized 100%. This topic is a little
advanced, but it's helpful to break the inner
linking structure down into three parts:

20.  Page depth refers to the number of required clicks
to get to a page from the homepage. Pages that are
available in one click are deemed more important
than those that are nearly hidden and require more
than 3 clicks to reach. It might seem a little strange,
but if you can visualize your website in a tree
graph, you will easily notice why certain pages are
performing poorly in the search engines.
 By organizing your site in this format, you can see
which pages are getting a lot of page depth love
and which are hurting. If you have a lot of
worthless pages and few important product pages,
you might take this opportunity to restructure
your site.

21.  This point is simple; the more internal links you
have that point to a certain page, the more
important search engines believe that page to be. A
common page that ranks well on almost every site
is the homepage. This point will continue to be
true for many years because nearly every
webmaster programs their site so that every page
has a link back to the homepage.
 So how do make your other pages benefit from
this? Does that mean you should have every page
on your site include a link to EVERY SINGLE

22.  PAGE in your site? No. That's an obvious red flag
to search engines, and you'll be seen as a spammer
if your site has a couple of paragraphs and then
500 links to every other page on your site.
 A better strategy would to have a "Top Products"
section that includes a link to pages you want to
receive the most link love. Another strategy is to
have a link for each of the major areas of your site.
This will help give those areas a lot of link love,
and in turn, they'll be able to get more link love to
the pages contained within them.

23.  Just including a bunch of internal links to an
important page is not enough; they also need to
be high quality links. For your most important
pages, make sure the links they receive have as
many of the following criterion as possible:
 Anchor Text - If you're targeting a certain
keyword(or keywords) make sure the internal
links have the keyword in the anchor text.
Also, bonus points for using slightly altered
anchor text throughout your site.

24.  Link Position - The higher a link occurs in the
HTML, the better. If you link to "cowboy hats"
at the top of the page, but "sombreros" towards
the bottom of the page, search engines are
going to view the link to "cowboy hats" as more
valuable than the link to "sombreros."
 Link Zone - The best scenario for link love is to
link from one page to a highly-related page.
The closer the subjects of each are in topic, the
higher the amount of link love that will be
transferred. For example, it is

25.  better to link form a page about "cowboy boots"
to a page about "cowboy hats" than it is to link
from a page about "tacos" to a page about
"cowboy hats." This doesn't mean you
shouldn't include links on pages that are
different, but just keep in mind that the link
love will not be as strong as it could be.