Keyword Optimization to Impress the Search Engines – All the Basics

By Philip J. Mutrie

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the standard practice of working keywords into your website text so the search engines can accurately categorize and rank every page on your website. Most people understand this much, but there is actually a lot more to learn about effective keyword optimization.

If you fail to make good use of keyword optimization you will suffer one of two horrible fates:

1. The search engines will ignore your website or critical pages of it and you will receive no exposure on search results pages.

2. You will be blacklisted by the search engines because they consider your site to be spam or of no good use to their searchers.

The major search engines such as Google and Yahoo have the power to make or break your online marketing efforts. They have this power because millions of people searching for information on websites depend on them to get references to the best websites in categories that interest them.

When you go to a search engine and perform a search you are a customer of the search engines. Since these engines have billions of searches performed every day to which they recommend websites that they have carefully explored, categorized and ranked, they have immense power in the world of Internet marketing.

If you don’t impress the search engines with your keyword optimization skills you simply don’t exist online. You lose out and your competitors jump ahead. It’s as simple as that.

So, what do you need to know about keyword optimization to impress the search engines and get the upper hand? Here are some basic tips that will help you use on-site and off-site SEO to communicate with and impress those search engines.

1. You can increase your ranking with the search engines by securing one-way links from other popular sites to your site. Article marketing is the easiest and cheapest way to accomplish this as long as every article submitted to directories carries a link back to your website.

2. Incoming links from other sites are more valuable then reciprocal links where you also link back to the other site.

3. Avoid link farms and sites that have a bad reputation with the search engines as you can be blacklisted just for linking to them or having your link on their site. Keep your online reputation clean!

4. Dedicate every page on your website to a different keyword or maybe a couple tightly related keywords. Every page will be categorized separately rather than just the entire site being categorized.

5. Make sure to name your website and blog with your most important keywords.

6. Include keywords in your page code, in the images, and in the meta tags.

7. Update the content on your website and blog regularly as the search engines love sites that offer fresh content on a routine basis.

8. Make sure all content on every page of your website is relevant to the keywords being used on that page.

9. You cannot be successful with a small website today. You need at least 10-20 pages and even more would be preferable.

10. Build up your back links and website pages over time. Putting too much up overnight may get you labeled as a spam site.

Organic SEO is the best form of keywords optimization. Follow these tips and you will be on your way to impressing the search engines and getting the results you want.