SEO secrets revealed

It can seem over whelming when you first start to optimise your website for the search engines. There is simply so much to remember, with also what seems like a mountain of jargon and buzz words to decode. In this first of many articles I will 'lead you by the hand' and take you through the stages of search engine optimisation step by step, explaining terms in detail so that you have all the information needed to hand in one guide.

Ok so what does this article cover? Well it covers the first stage of search engine optimisation which is on page optimisation. This is where the content of the website has to be structured in a way to be 'pleasing' to the search engines. The first step is to ensure that keywords are included in the title tags of each webpage. Now for those who do not know that keywords are they are phrases entered into a search engine such as Yahoo, Bing or Google to produce a results page. Now it is beyond of the scope of this article to go into depth regarding HTML, you should familiarise yourself with some basic HTML before you start to manually alter your title tags, just look for the 'title' and '/title' tags, put your keywords in between these tags.

Now at the beginning of each document you should have a heading, so for example if your website is about classic cars then you will need to include a heading along the lines of welcome to my classic car site, not forgetting to replace 'my classic car site' with the keyword rich content that aptly describes your site. Now it may be obvious as to what I have just written, but wait a second! You need to put this with 'h1' tags. Now for those who aren't familiar with HTML an 'h1' tags is the largest heading that you can have and thus it is given the most weight by search engines. So if you give your page a good heading with keywords in between these tags then the search engine will deem that page to do with the keywords that you have included in between the heading tags.

The next tip is to include keyword rich content throughout the page that you are optimising for. So basically throughout all your paragraphs include keywords in your sentence. Remember not to overdo it and thus spam your page with keywords. This could have negative consequences and the search engines could deem that as spamming and will penalise you, potentially banning you from the search engine. In extreme cases this could be permanently. Remember your paragraphs should be written naturally with the odd keyword 'sprinkled' here and there. Try not to use too few keywords as this is limiting the keywords that you can optimise your site for. Similarly don't use too many keywords as you will dilute the page and it will be difficult for the search engine to see what specific keywords you are targeting.

Try also to put keywords within bold tags. These for those who are not familiar with HTML are the 'b' tags. Again try to make your paragraphs read naturally, including keywords where you can, the most important ones can be put in between bold tags. Now you can use a cascading style sheet to change the appearance of bold text so that it looks like normal text, only the search engines will see it differently.

And finally my last tip is to include descriptions within alt tags for images that contain keywords, again make sure that you don't include too many keywords, so for example if the picture is of a triumph classic car then the keywords could include triumph classic sports car.