Search Engine Optimization Basics That Everyone Should Know

By Jeff Lawrence

An idea formulated in your mind and you acted on it. You started a company and soon you created a website. How do you go about promoting the website to generate traffic to come to your website? You need to engage in search engine optimization (seo) to cleanly help generate traffic to your website. Clean seo revolves around making changes to your website to better help google and yahoo in particular index your site, and get into the top spots for specific keywords. The first step in seo is to add yourself to every known search engine available. This includes google, yahoo, dmoz, and every other search engine you can get into. submitting to more sites than those is fine, but don't expect a lot of hits. You can do this first because it sometimes takes weeks or even months for the bots of the various search engines to come around to index your website. The next is to create accounts for google sitemaps and yahoo explorer. Both of these are places where you will need to create a sitemap of your website. A sitemap is a simple xml or txt file that lists all the available pages on your website. It helps the bot going around to your site index it properly. once you have done that you need to work on your site.
You need to make sure that the keywords that you're trying to obtain are really worth your time. Trying to get a #1 spot for the keyword "clothing" probably isn't worth your time and effort. Instead you should use a keyword selector tool like overture's. It will let you type in a specific keyword like "clothing" and then see alternatives that people are searching for. Once you find out the keywords that you're interested in head over to your web files and start editing your files. You need to insert the < meta name="keywords" content="purple hats, velvet hats" / > on every page. You can adjust the keywords depending on the product and what you're specifically trying to target. Once you have completed this you need to do the same for your title and description. no one is probably going to search for your specific company name, so you need to create a catchy title and description that garners genuine interest in your website. Avoid putting your company name at the front of the title; instead put it at th end. For your description describe what your company does in a unique way. avoid descriptions that focus on, "cheap clothes here." Instead appear professional in your description, while utilizing the space to wisely describe what you have to offer.

Once you have that you have the absolute basics down. you will now want to focus on creating content to drive customers to your site. Can you write an article that is unique to the industry that you're in? Do you offer a blog? Do you have some insight that others would find interesting? What you're trying to do here is drive customers to your website, and then link to your website on their own. Google and Yahoo in particular find that reciprocal linking is a good way to track the effectiveness of a website. If 10k people are linked to a website then obviously there is something there that is worth seeing. You will subsequently move up in the search results for those various websites. For more detailed help about seo suggestions see self-seo which offers a wide variety of tools and articles. If you have any further questions that we haven't clearly addressed, or just need some advise feel free to email us at info@sonicko.com or visit us at http://www.sonicko.com About the author
Jeff Lawrence is the owner of Sonicko Consultanting. This article may be reused provided that the full content is published. Sonicko focuses on web analytics and Google Analytics in particular. They provide Google Analytics installation and implementation, training, and support among other services. Based out of Los Angeles, CA you can reach them at their website: http://www.sonicko.com

source : seoarticles4u.com