Do It Yourself SEO

Internet surfers use search engines more than any other tool to find things on the internet. Search engines rank their results using a complex formula that considers web page content, link popularity and other details. That is why you should Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your web site.

First before you begin you want to identify your key words. It's crucial that you know and understand the search terms surfers will use to find your website with. If your not sure yet try thinking of search terms you would use to find your website. After you locate your keywords make a list of approximately 50 (if you're able to realize that many) keywords and target them.

Next you want to identify your competitors. Start searching with your site's targeted keywords and study the top ranked competing sites. Make a list of the top 10 to 15 sites and examine every one of these web sites. While reviewing each of the competing websites take a look at the search engine optimization methods that they use.

Meta tags are thought by most to have little impact, If any at all, on your website's ranking, but is still recommend to use. It's far better to be safe than sorry! The meta description tag is used to refer to a web page's content into the search engines. Most search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc) get the web site's description in the web page's content and not from the meta description tag. Write a description of your website here and make it brief.

The keyword tag tells the search engines what keywords are related to your website. You should place your most important keywords here and add no more than 15 keywords. The Title tag is probably among the most important search engine optimization techniques today. Not only will the search engine spider view this, but also the surfers. Place your most important keywords in it and be creative. Don't make it more than it has to be.

Keyword density is an integral part of SEO. On each page write about 200 to 500 words. Write it with your targeted keyword phrases. Remember not to over due it and get banned from the search engines for spam or create your visitors despise you. Place your keywords in bold and in the heading tag. Try to get a density of 5 to 15%.

Search engines won't just use links to find new sites, but they will count each link to a website and use this to determine how popular that site is. What you would like to get is quality links. These links should come from web sites that are related to your subject. Do not exchange links with every site possible. Make care to look at each one before exchanging links. Make sure they're a clean and professional website. Look to determine whether they use spam.

Other thing to consider is to make sure HTML is legitimate. Spiders are somewhat like the browser you use, they read the HTML to display the webpage. If your HTML code contains errors, spiders may not be able to locate the content on the page. Although most spiders will try to fix minor errors in HTML code, it could still hurt your ranking. Go to w3.org to have your HTML code supported.