What keywords should I use?

This is one of the most important things in search engine optimization. The crawler, when he visits your site, has to know what your site is about based on these keywords. First of all you have to choose a primary keyword phrase . This phrase should be the phrase most searched. Don't try to choose a phrase too competitive because it will take a lot of time to rank well and you will probably have to buy a lot of links. I you have a business that sells used cars don't choose your main keyword "cars". This generic terms were taken a long time ago by smart people(and rich too know). You have to choose a program that tells you how many searches a keyword receives. I use http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/keywords.html . It even has a free trial. Using this program I have found out that "cars" receives 1,329,755 searches, "used cars" receives 414,996 searches, "second hand cars" receives 3,421 searches. Even for 'used cars' is almost impossible to rank well if you don't plan on buying links. Your target visitors should be the people from the city where you sell the cars . That's why you need to rank better for that state/country and one way to this is to include the name of the city/state in your keywords. "used cars new york" gets 456 searches. Once you have chosen your primary keyword phrase you should think about other secondary keyword phrase (derivative from your primary keyword). Always look if the plural form of the keywords are more searched than the singular form. Google knows its still the same word but you will rank better for the the form you choose to optimise.

How should I build my website

In order for your site to be seo friendly you should write your html page using a small number a html tags. Google always compares the text in your site(the text that is visible to your users) to the hole html file.

The first thing you can do is to include your javascript and css in external file(they should be in your index.html). This is how you can do this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="url to css file"/>

<script language='javascript' src='url to javascript file'></script>

One other thing you can do is not to use tables but the div tag. Organize your index.html using div and css. You will see that it's much easier , especially when you have to modify something.

Decreasing your site size will also make google's crawler to visit it more often.

How to get crawled faster

Every search engine uses a crawler(also known as a web spider or web robot) to get the information from your page. To be in a search engine index is similar to be crawled by that search engine. After you have been crawled the search engine will begin ranking your site for a number a words. The more pages you have in your index( rich content pages ) the more visitors you will get. Therefor let's see what can you do to get more indexed pages.

First of all you will need some links( even one should be enough ) to be indexed. After the crawler visits your page you will want to give him reasons to revisit your site. You can do this by always giving him a fresh content . A fresh rich content and by that I mean writing your own text (a page should have a minimum of 200 words) full of the keywords you want to rank better. If you arrive at a point when Google stops adding more pages in his index you should get more external links too. One very important thing that you should do is add a sitemap to Google webmaster tools. By adding a sitemap you basically tell Google how your site is build and you will be crawled faster.

How to increase the traffic on your site

Now that you know what search engine optimization is , you probably want to know exactly what to do to increase the traffic on your site and therefor increase your earnings because for any kind of site (it can be just a blog or it can be an ecommerce site where you sell your products) more traffic means more income. There are two types of optimizations you can do:

- On site optimization . You can change your site so that it will responds better to google. The main things to do on your site is to include your target keywords in your site content as many times as possible. Include them in your page title, meta tags (some say it doesn't matter any more but you don't have anything to loose if you do it), heading tags, links tags, alt on image tags . If you calculate your keyword density it should be about 5%. Don't overdue it because it may be considered span.

- Optimization outside your site. By this I mean external links. Get as many as possible. If you hope to rank better for a competitive keyword(one generic keyword that it is searched many times) this is the most important part of the optimization, and also the part the will take more money. There are lots of ways to get links for site. You can get even free links from blogs , directories and forums. Try not to get links with the same description , anchor text and target page. You won't get penalized but your links will loose their value to google because it will be considered spam.

SEO Introduction

If you are a webmaster you have probably heard the term seo before , but even if you worked some years in web developer it is possible that you don't know much about seo. Don't worry seo isn't something difficult to explain and on this blog I will try to explain. In fact I guarantee you that you will be a seo expert after reading this article (Just kidding. It will take some time thought but when you think about it it's quite logical.)

I believe that many untrained people concentrate their work on design (maybe making flash sites) and they will be surprised because their site won't get any visitors. You can make a brilliant site, but without visitors it's useless and because most of the traffic on the Internet is generated by search engines I think that, no matter what kind of site you make , you should always take into consideration the importance of seo. Many people neglect seo and I honestly feel that this is the biggest mistake you can make.

Let's start with with explaining what seo is. Seo means Search Engine Optimization and it basically means constructing a seo friendly site in order to increases your site's traffic. I have already said that it is the main source of traffic on the Internet but this is not the only reason it is important. Well seo generates a constant number of users per day and the best part is it's free. You can pay thousands of dollars on adwords campaigns and achieve the same results with seo. Of course sometimes you have to pay for links although google doesn't agree with paid links.

This is just a small introduction on seo. If you want to learn more please continue to read this blog.