Search Engine Optimization is an Art Form

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by Robert Kelsey

I’ll repeat that … Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art form, it’s not a programming language or coding method. I like to think of SEO as an orchestra. The drum, tuba, clarinet and all the rest of the instruments may sound nice when played by themselves, but sound really GREAT when they all play together in an orchestrated manner. SEO is much the same … there are certain pieces of the puzzle that you work to improve on, and when they all come together, you have an optimized website.

Getting top listings doesn’t come by accident. If you know SEO techniques you should try to build them into your site as you build it. That is probably not your situation and you have a site built by someone else and it needs to be optimized. I suggest that your focus your first efforts on optimization after you have a completed site.

It will be of great benefit to you if you learn some good solid SEO skills before you start making changes to your site. If you simply start making changes you will not know why your listings may change, if they do. An often made mistake is keyword stuffing or over using important techniques like H1 tags and so on.

Something to avoid is overuse of your keywords. It happens all the time too. People just don’t understand the history behind the spider spamming and think that more is better. 50 keywords on your page will probably get you banned for that keyword. Five on the page may well get you listed high for it. Algorithms are always changing and there really is no one keyword density for any given page. This is something that has roots in all the other facets of your page, everything else that is there, and where any given keyword appears, whether it’s in heading tags, or just text. Get lots of inbound links.

Although SEO really is a lot of common sense, the adage that common sense isn’t common can play very true with SEO. You need to do some studying of SEO techniques in order to develop your strategy, for your site. Visit all the sites you can and read. Then read more. Everything that you need to know in order to succeed with your site in online as available information. If you apply optimization techniques properly to your website, and get inbound links, you will succeed.

Let’s face it, without listings “above the fold”, (visible without scrolling) on the first page at Google, you are just not going to get many visitors. You need to get your site into these top positions in order to make any real advancement in your online marketing.

You will get 99% of your traffic from Google, MSN and Yahoo! No doubt about that. You need to optimize your site for these engines. By this I mean take each page of your site and optimize each part of the page for these engines.

There are many optimization techniques, both on-site and off-site. The main on-site changes you will want to make will be to improve or add on the 1) title tag, 2) code attributes (alt=, title= and summary=), 3) keyword density, 4) use of H1 and h2 tags, maybe even using H3 tags, 5) your navigation and anchor text used, 6) meta description and keywords tags and 7) internal linking. Get all these things right and you have the major SEO efforts taken care of.

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August 7, 2008 by Robert Kelsey  
Filed under SEO

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