When it comes to growing your online visibility, it is useful to divide the tasks into on-page factors and off-page factors. In brief, on-page factors are basically the design, content and structure of the web page and web site, and off-page factors include things like time online and many factors related to the links to your website. This article will focus solely on on-page factors.
The most important thing to understand is that most search engines are, at their core, huge text databases, at least when it comes to things that will greatly affect your search engine visibility. That said, a website that is mostly image or Flash animation-based is not going to have a lot of luck appearing on the search engines. There are several ways to check what the search engines can see using online tools, but the quickest way is to view the underlying code for a web page. To do this using the Firefox browser, choose View>Page Source from the menu bar or do CTRL + U. For Internet Explorer, chose View>Source. Look for words between the and the tags. Note, just because you see words on your website, it does not mean that it is search-engine friendly text; it could be an image with text on it-basically worthless for SEO purposes.
The goal of your SEO efforts should be to get relevant text in the correct places on your web page. In order of importance: 1) page title, 2) h1 tagged text (header) at the top of your page, 3) h2, h3 tagged text at the top of your page, 4) the first few paragraphs of text at the top of your page, 5) bold/emphasis text in your first few paragraphs, 6) meta description and keyword text in your page code, and 7) alt tags on your images. Look at this as a hierarchy and realize that the first few are much more important than the last few. These are all easily identifiable in any good web page authoring software.
When writing the text for your website, it is imperative to avoid keyword stuffing. This is where you identify a keyword or keyword phrase, "titanium rings" for example, and then proceed to use it repeatedly in your web page text. More is not better, as the search engines have been able to identify this trick for years and will most likely severely penalize your website for doing this. The arguments about the correct keyword density run passionate and deep in the SEO world. The best strategy is to do some research and take the conservative recommendations as your guide.
It is highly recommended that you research the keywords you want to target. For example, you might find better results with "men's titanium engagement rings' than "men's rings" because of the level of competition and the relevance to your product or service. In other words, make sure your keywords are directly relevant to content and goals of your website, while taking into consideration the relative competition. In general, you want to find relevant keywords with significant numbers of searches with relatively low competition. These are hard to identify, for certain. There are many fine tools available for free and as a subscription online to help with your keyword research.
In the end, the complexity of do-it-yourself SEO is best suited for those with a lot of time or for those who enjoy the challenge of learning new things. It is not something that can be mastered in a few hours. The web design and research tools can be expensive and have a very steep learning curve. That said, for those with a keen eye for research and detail, do-it-yourself SEO can be an enjoyable and rewarding endeavor.
Thane_Johnson
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