I have decided to create this post as a beginners guide to SEO. The first, and most important step to getting ranked highly in the search engines, is to know what keywords you want to target. Whenever someone types something into google and clicks search, the exact word/phrase they typed in is called a keyword. So if I typed into google "cheap flights to New York" , Google would class that as a keyword. Remember, Keywords can be more than one word! Google still class phrases as keywords! That sounds confusing, but just remember keywords are whatever people type into google! The aim of SEO is to get your website/article/blog ranked as highly as possible in the search engine results, for a "PARTICULAR KEYWORD". Lets say my website was about Fishing, then I may choose to try and rank highly for keywords such as "How can I catch more Tuna fish" or "Where can I get cheap fishing equiptment". There are two types of keywords. Short tail and Long tail keywords. Short tail tend to be 1-3 words. So keywords such as: "Cheap Flights" "Designer Shoes" These are short tail keywords. Short tail keywords are EXTREMELY competitive, so there is no point trying to target these keywords, because you will not rank highly for them. These keywords were dominated years ago. Forget trying to rank highly for short tail keywords. The other types of keywords are Long Tail keywords. These tend to be 4+ words, and are far less competitive. So continuing from the examples above, examples may include: "Cheap and Direct Flights To the Caribbean" "Red Leather Designer High Heels" Longer tail keywords are less competitive, and there are still plenty of long tail keywords out there that you could get onto page 1 of google for. But how do you decide what keywords to target? How do you know if you have any chance of getting onto page 1 of google for your chosen keyword. To do this, you have to carry out keyword research. Here is a simple method to carry out research and find profitable keywords. Type "Google Keyword Tool" into Google, and open up the program. Type in a keyword related to your niche, and click search. You will then be presented with an entire page of keyword ideas. Now find a keyword with over 3000 global searches a month. Take this keyword, wrap it in speech marks (e.g "weight loss") and type it into google. At the top of the google results page, there will be a figure for how many search results there are for that exact keyword. You want this figure to be below 60,000. If your keyword meets these two requirements, then it is a potentially profitable keyword, and you should be able to get onto page 1 for this keyword. One way to do this is to then write a keyword rich article and submit it to a directory such as ezine articles. Make sure you do the following when writing your article: 1.) Make sure your keyword forms the start of your articles title. 2.) Try and make the opening sentence to your article contain your keyword. 3.) Make your articles keyword density around 2%, so 2% of the articles content is your keyword. If you write a keyword rich article meeting these three requirements, your article should potentially get on page 1 of google. You can then add a link back to your website in the article resource box, and you will then gain a good amount of free traffic to your website each month. If you would prefer to try and have your website on page 1 of google, then you will need to optimise your website for this chosen keyword. To do this, you need to understand how Google rank web pages. Google look for three elements, all of which they LOVE. 1.) Content 2.) Backlinks 3.) Relevance Firstly, keep producing new, high quality content for your website. Google love useful content, so make sure your website is full of it. Ensure you are updating your website regularly, and that visitors are being provided with useful and interesting content. Secondly, focus on those backlinks. A backlink is when another webpage links to your website. Get as many of these as you can. Your articles are one great method to generate backlinks. Don't just submit these articles to article directories. Try and submit them to popular blogs or websites. They will be happy to use your article (provided its good quality) as they get fresh content for free. Having you article on a popular blog or website will also drive massive traffic back to your site. Lastly, you need your site to be relevant to what visitors have searched for via the search engines. If someone searches for "Cheap Flights To New York", then search results they see need to be relevant to this search term. Its no good showing them pages about cheap flights to Canada. To rank your site highly in google, you need to show its relevant to the keywords you are targeting. To do this, you need to optimise your websites content for they keyword you are targeting. To do this, try and make sure your content on your website is related to the keyword you are targeting. Furthermore, try and include your keyword in your website as much as possible (Where appropriate, so that it blends in with the content, and makes sense). If you do these three things, and are targeting a well researched key word, you should have no trouble getting onto page 1 of Google. Hope you all find this useful.
Thanks for the tips. All I can add is that persistence and consistency pay off. Be smart about your SEO and it will do the same for you.
I'm pretty new at seo so reading these tips makes me happy that I seem to be on the right track. Thanks for the tips
Thanks for the tips and it really help me as a beginner. Will you please share the way to how to create backlinks as for us who are the really new comer at SEO jobs.
google "submitem now" only add on for firefox its great.... its an auto form filler just have to enter captcha codes thats like 3 secs....fully customised with just a right click on mouse and gets u turning over website and classified submissions in less than 10 secs a site so fast and great definately recommend...also you can add directories and free websites submit sites to its directories.....most sites need you to re-submit every 60 or so days so ur directory keeps growing....also google like new content so the more often ur website changes or gets bigger in other words with more posts it gets a better rank....i have a wordpress blog on the backend of my site makes it easy and its ranked in top 1mill for a boring removalist website been ranked at 300 thou with only 9 pages
good tips for newbies and just to add.. you wil never get immediate results in SEO. You must have patience in you. Succesful SEO requires good link building which takes time. SO you must agree to spend lots of time with good patience.
I think it is a good piece of info for newbies but instead of being highly ranked for pr they shoudl focus mainly on unique content makes it easier to rank for those longer keywords.