search engine optimization basic seo

Basic SEO advice
To be straight with you - the best and only fool proof way of having a website adored by the search engines and your visitors is to provide an original relivant informative quality website. The following article will help you with some basic information, but always be aware that trying to trick the search engnes may work short term, but could hit you hard in the long term. If you are setting up a big business site consulting a SEO expert may well be a wise investment.
Search engine optimization ( SEO ) should be about looking at how people are looking up information on the web and building your site to suit, and not how you may trick them into visiting your website. Surfers don't like it when you trick them and neither do the SE's

1~ KEYWORDS - how to choose them
Some basic points to consider (and yes some of them are so very simple, but you would be surprised at how often they are over looked.
    ~ Make your keywords relevant - the keyword car on a pets website is a waste of time, you want visitors to your website that are seeking information or services for pets not cars!
~ Use lots of relevant content, well laid out into separate pages with your keywords included naturally in the text (best results are often obtained if you optimize one page for one keyword.)
~ Don't limit yourself to single keywords. according to research done by Entireweb only only about 19% of people search by entering a single keyword - 31% of people enter two word phrases into search engines and 25% of all users look for three word combinations! An added bonus is that single keywords often have very high competition from established sites so by using a "long tailed keyword" you stand a much better chance of ranking for your chosen words

~ Don't choose a keyword that nobody will be looking for, if a keyword is only searched for 3 times a year its not worth using, find a ballance between the highly popular (too hard to compete with) and the words that no one searches for.

    ~ Only use generally popular keywords if you do not need targeted traffic but be more specific if you need targeted surfers. I.E "dating site" is fine for an international dating site "new york dating " is better if you are a dating agency in New York

~ Try not to use words that may get your site filtered or banned from search engines.I.E "gender" would be better than "sex" as this is likely to be blocked by family friendly filters and even the SE's filters

2 ~ META TAGS

<Title> ~The title should not be any longer than 70-100 characters, including spaces. It is best to include your keywords in the title but do not repete them.

<Meta Description> ~ Keep this short and relevant (again include your sites main keywords. Different search engines have different rules as to how lare this tag should be. Google limits you to 100 characters DMOZ allows 25-30 words, scrubtheweb allows 150 characters etc

<Meta Keywords> Again this tag size differs from SE to SE, using no more than 300 characters is advised. This is also a tricky tag in the sense that there are a few rules to follow to prevent being considered as spamming.
~ Do not use words that are not present in the body of the page (your content)
~ Never use any word more than three times as this will be viewed as spam.

3 ~ CONTENT
~ Quality content is king, after all its what your visitors are looking for so its what the SE's want too
    ~Try to include your main keywords at the beginning of the page and if possible in bold.
    ~ Do not overuse keywords. No keyword should take up more than 12-24% of the text as it is often considered as spam (key word stuffing).
   ~ Keep your first page small to medium sized with few images for a relevant fast loading page

4 ~ LINKS - Search Engines Love quality inbound links
How to get links will be covered in another article but it is worth pointing out that search engines (especially the big G) love links from relevant websites (IE pet sites linking to your pet site) It is considered a vote of quality if other websites link to yours, so when possible get as many quality links as you can as inbound links to a website play a significant part in determining its position in the search engines.Always be aware though, it's not just about the quantity, but also the quality of links to your website which is of importance.

4 ~ AVOID - Just don't do it the SE's hate it
~Links accessible solely through frames, image maps, or JavaScript
~ Very long pages
~ Very short pages
~ Flash pages
~Dynamic URLs