Free Affilate Marketing Tutorials: Search Engine Optimization 101: Optimize Your Page

Search Engine Optimization 101: Optimize Your Page

Welcome to the tutorial on Search Engine Optimization!

There are a number of things you can do to make each page of your site higher in search engine listings and rankings.
First thing to do is to select a single keyword or phrase for your page. An example of a phrase might be "work at home opportunity" and this keyword phrase will be used in may of the examples throughout this tutorial.

Once you have selected a single keyword or phrase it's time to optimize for that word.

Suggestion 1
If you are purchasing a new domain, try to have some of your more generic keywords in domain name.
Spaces are not allowed in a domain but you can substitute an under score or minus for the spaces.
Say we had the keywords "work at home opportunity" some possible domains might be:

WorkAtHomeOpportunity.com
work-at-home-opportunity.com
work_at_home_opportunity.com

One thing to remember is that domain names are case insensitive. In other words it doesn't matter if the letters are capitalized or not. So the word OPPORTUNITY = opportunity = OpPoRtUnItY.

Suggestion 2
Use your keyword or phrase in your file names and directory name.
Spaces are not allowed in a file names but you can substitute an under score or minus for the spaces.
Say we had the keywords "work at home opportunity" some possible file names might be:

WorkAtHomeOpportunity.html
work-at-home-opportunity.html
work_at_home_opportunity.html

One thing to remember is that file names and directory names are case sensitive. In other words it DOES matter if the letters are capitalized or not. So the word OPPORTUNITY is different from opportunity and is different from OpPoRtUnItY.

Suggestion 3
If you using PHP or ASP you can pass an extra variable in the url with your keywords.
Example: www.MyDomain.com/work-at-home-opportunity.php?var1=7&var2=abc&var3=work at home opportunity

It's generally okay to have spaces in your keywords if they're just another variable being passed in the url.

Suggestion 4
In the title tag in your page you should have your keywords.
Example: <TITLE>Work At Home Opportunity</TITLE>

Suggestion 5
Be sure to put your keywords in your meta tags in your page.
Example:
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Learn About The Best Work At Home Opportunity">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Work At Home Opportunity">

Although not all search engines care about meta including Google, it won't hurt and certainly may help!
Tip: Search for your keywords on different search engines. Click on the pages that come up in the top 10 or 20 of the search engine listings and look at the meta tags in their source code. You may get ideas from what you see in your competitors meta tags.

Suggestion 6
Near the top of page it's a good idea to have a headline with your keywords in it.
Example: <H1>Work At Home Opportunity</H1>

Search Engines like Google look for pages with a headline tag like the one above and will frequently give your page a better ranking for the keywords found within the <H1> tags.

<H2> tags are used as sub-headlines. It's a good idea to put your keywords in the tags.
Example: <H2>Work At Home Opportunity</H2>

Suggestion 7
This is probably the most time consuming suggestion but perhaps the most effective thing you can do.
On the page place some real content. Yes, it's definitely good to have a few paragraphs of text relating to your keywords. Be sure to sprinkle your keywords throughout the text. Try to have 5% to 10% of the words in your text be your keywords. Much less than 5% and search engines won't rank your web page very high for the desired keywords. Go way over 10% and search engines, especially Google, will get suspicious. The last thing you want to do is to have Google think you're up to no good and get your site black listed.

Suggestion 8
Find 3 instances of your keywords in the text on your page (not the title or headlines) and italicize one instance, bold one instance, and underline one instance. Some say this will help with your page's rank but don't recommend you do this more than once for each (bold, underline, & italicize).

Suggestion 9
Images displayed on your site should have an alt attribute in your image tags.
Example: <img src="logo" alt="Work At Home Opportunity">

If you don't have any images on your page, it might be a good idea to put 1 or 2 images on your page so you can use this trick.

Suggestion 10
Put an instance of your keyword right at the end of your web page, close to the </BODY> tag.

Suggestion 11
Don't try to outsmart search engines by doing sneaky things like having lots of keywords on your page that are the same color as the background color. It might work for a while but eventually they're gonna figure out what your up to and then decide not to list your page at all.

Suggestion 12
Go to Google and do a search for you keywords. Take a look at the source code of the pages that are in the top 10 results list. Look at the title tags, meta tags, and there text onm their page.

Suggestion 13
Remember that search engines will rank your page higher for your keywords if you have your keywords appear higher in the page. This is especially important when you have site navigation on the top or on the left of your page.

If you have navigation on the top, consider putting it on the left, right or bottom of the page. It might just help you.

If you put your navigation on the left, there's something you need to consider.
Say your page has a format something like:

Home
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Contact

text with your
keywords go here

So what a visitor to your site will see is the table up above.
But what the search engines see is the following code:

<table border="2" width="300">
   <tr valign="top">
      <td align="center" width="100">
         <a href="home.htm">Home</a><br>
         <a href="page1.htm">Page 1</a><br>
         <a href="page2.htm">Page 2</a><br>
         <a href="page3.htm">Page 3</a><br>
         <a href="contact.htm">Contact</a>
      </td>
      <td align="center" width="200">
         <p>text with your<br>
         keywords go here </p>
      </td>
   </tr>
</table>

Notice where your keywords appear? They don't appear very close to the top of the page, and that's not good.
If you can get those keywords up higher on the page the search engines will rank your page higher for those keywords. Below is the code to do just that:

<table border="2" width="300">
   <tr valign="top">
      <td align="center" width="100" height="0"></td>
      <td align="center" width="200" rowspan="2">
         <p>text with your<br>
         keywords go here </p>
      </td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
      <td align="center" width="100">
         <a href="home.htm">Home</a><br>
         <a href="page1.htm">Page 1</a><br>
         <a href="page2.htm">Page 2</a><br>
         <a href="page3.htm">Page 3</a><br>
         <a href="contact.htm">Contact</a>
      </td>
   </tr>
</table>


Notice how your keywords are much higher than before in the code?
Below is how the table looks to a visitor:

text with your
keywords go here

Home
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Contact

Search engine optimization can be a difficult task. There's a lot to know and things are always changing. Continually look for more information about it and keep yourself up to date on the latest developments.

One site I highly recommend is SEO Chat:
http://www.seochat.com/




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