Basic seo tips for online advertisers and publishers

Why SEO?
If you own websites, whether for your business or personal use, you need to somehow attract traffic. Otherwise, owing a website is only just your personal endeavor or achievement. Websites need traffic – No doubt about that. Whether you share info or sell products, you need visitors to read or buy yours. No traffic equals no visitor No visitor equals no goals reached. Your visitors can come from many origins – From online and/or off line advertising, buzz or word of mouth, or the search engine. While the first two involve extraordinary content and a certain amount of investment, the last one need extra special care to optimize it.



What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is formatting your web site for search engines to easily read and understand your content. SEO is used to make your site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keywords. If you aren’t on the first page for your keywords, it’s likely you won’t receive that much organic search engine traffic. Thus, the real goal of Search Engine Optimization is not to get high positions in search engines for your pages. It is to get more visitors to your website. SEO is like poker, it takes a few minutes to learn but a few years to master.

How Does SEO Work?
Search engine optimization works on the principle of satisfying search engine algorithms. Search engines used advanced mathematical equations to analyze and sort websites. Websites that correspond to those equations(algorithms) with highest relevancy get top spots in search results. The algorithms are somewhat decoded through various tests by search engine optimizers, however, there is no magic formula to find out how SEO works.

What are basic seo tips?
Keyword Rich Domain:
While choosing a domain keep in mind about your site’s main keyword. It’s always better to have the main keyword for your site in the domain part. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN offers more priority to those websites that has been hosted on the base of their main keyword. You will receive considerable amount of response form all the major search engines if your URL is main keyword based. But do not go for a keyword stuffed domain. This may bring you negative impact in terms of search engine response.

Use keywords on your site:
Using keywords on your site is one of the most important elements of any web site. Keywords should not only be used in the titles and headlines, but they shoud also be in the actual body of the text. An important aspect of SEO is to learn keyword research.

Title Tag:
This is another important On-Page factor that can offer you good search engine visibility if used wisely. This is an element that is absolutely under your control as a Webmaster. You need to use keywords for the title tag cleverly by selecting them. Be sure that these are the part on your web page that will be read by the visitors as well as by the search engines. Do not stuff keywords with the title tag. It will make you look Spammy on the job.

Meta tags:
These are descriptions on a web page that are not seen by most visitors except when looking at the page source code in their browser. While the keyword and description metatags used to be the primary way that search engines indexed sites, that is no longer the case. However, you shouldn’t ignore them entirely, as it is still worthwhile to include them as a part of your page description. For optimal SEO, your meta description and keyword tags should be no more than 150 characters each.

Optimize your images
Make sure all your images have alternative tags. Search engines cannot determine what is in your images. Alt tags tell the search engines what is in the image. Make sure your file names say what is in the picture. Seperate the words with dashes so that search engines can read your file names. For example, if you have a picture of a dog being trained name the file dog-being-trained.jpg.

Keyword density:
Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears on a web page. Rather than trying to focus on the number of times a keyword appears in the content of your page, aim for a more natural density by keeping your keyword phrases in mind as you write the copy for your page. Optimally, keyword density should be between 2% – 7%. There are a number of keyword density checkers available online to assist you with determining the keyword density of a page.

Inbound links:
Reciprocal link exchange (you link to my site and I’ll link to yours) used to be a great way to attract the attention of search engines to your site. Now, search engines pay attention only to the quality and popularity of the site providing you with an inbound link that is not a reciprocal link. One of the best ways to get quality inbound links back to your site is to submit articles to high traffic article directories and submit press releases to paid press release services.

Site maps:
There are sitemaps that help a visitor navigate a site, and sitemaps that are expressly designed for the search engines. The two are not the same. To enhance your site, submit an xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer. Use XML Sitemaps to build search engine-friendly sitemaps on your sites.