A Single Step
Welcome to my quest to become an internet marketing Jedi. Follow me as I learn SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Niche Marketing and other online money-making strategies. Hopefully, some of you will learn from my baby-steps. Perhaps, one day, when I've mastered all this, I'll teach you.

Monday, February 7, 2011

On-page SEO From Memory

Alright, folks; I'm back from my vacation in Amsterdam.  Let's see how much I can remember about SEO without looking at my notes after spending a week and a half in a Purple Haze.  I'm gonna split this into two articles.  The first will deal with on-page SEO and I'll do off-page SEO later.  Here goes.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is divided into two types; on-page and off-page SEO.  On-page SEO is what you do on your website to let the search engine crawlers know that your site is relevant to a given search.  It mostly involves figuring out your key words and tweaking the HTML code.  There're lots of tools available for finding your key words.  The only one I've used so far (because it's free) is Google's Adsense Keyword Tool.  You start with a broad search of one key word you know you're interested in and narrow it down by adding other words to get a key-word phrase.  With the broad search, if you type in, for example, car parts, you'll get results for "car" and "parts" with any number of words before, after, and between them.  If you actually put both words in quotes, you'll get results for "car parts" together, but you'll still get results with other words before and after them, but not between them.  If you put (car parts) in brackets, you will only get results for those two words together; you will not get any results with other words before, after, or between them.  (I should probably check out other free keyword tools.  One of my goals is to see if I can MAKE money without spending a single penny.  I'm gonna have a project or two that I WILL spend money on, but I want to have one project that I've spent absolutely no money on.)  

Once you've got you key words and/or key-word phrases, you need to start putting them in the right places.  You should use at least one or two key words in your domain name, URLs, H tags, and image alt tags.  Your domain name is the address of your home page; the part that ends with .com or .net or .org.  Your URLs are the addresses of each page within your website.  They're your domain name plus the additional stuff that directs a visitor to a particular page.  H tags are Header Tags.  There's H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6.  The lower the number, the more important they are.  There's also a Title Tag, which is very important.  The title tag is the description of your website that appears below the link to your site when it pops up in the search results.  Off the top of my head, I can't remember if the title tag and the H1 tag are the same thing, but I don't think they are.  I believe the H1 tag is the main heading for your site.  I remember that the H1 tag is like the title of an article or an essay and the lower H tags are like the paragraph headings within the article.  The image alt tags are a description of any images you use on your site.  Apparently, it's a good idea to insert some of your key words into those alt descriptions in the HTML.

Another thing you can do is link your articles to each other.  A visitor shouldn't have to click more than three or maybe four links to get from any one page on your site to any other page on your site.

Alright, that's about all I can remember off the top of my head.  It seems like there should be more, but I guess I'll find out after I publish this and then go back and look at my previous articles on the subject.  I'm sure there'll be many "D'oh!"s and much forehead slapping.  Stay tuned.  Today you get a two-for-one deal.  I'm about to offer a tip on how to network and get your name out there.  Catch ya later.

No comments:

Post a Comment