Free Search Engine Optimization Course

Part One

This is a free search engine optimization course. With this course you will learn about search engines, search engine optimization, why SEO is important, SEO tactics, how to build incoming links, and how to generate free website traffic to your website.

You are allowed to read and learn from this course only. You are not allowed to copy, steal, or sell this course. This course was designed to help you understand Search Engine Optimization. All rights are protected by LMO Enterprises and Tony Curles (c).

For years, promoting my websites was accomplished with pay-per-click ads, banner ads, and off line marketing strategies. After several years of marketing, I began to notice that my websites were dropping their rank in the search engines. Brand new websites were blowing right by my website’s ranking in the search engines. I never took the time to learn the importance of SEO back then, but it was beginning to affect my online business. It was time to make the change that was necessary to keep up with the internet world. I learned all I could about search engine optimization, which made the difference for my online business. You must learn search engine optimization to survive with an online business. Trends are occurring everyday, and you must keep up with these trends to be successful online.

What is Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of improving your website to attract a larger volume of quality organic traffic from the search engines. Organic web traffic is free and is always on the left side of the search result pages. Search engine optimization is also done to rank higher on the search engine result pages, which will always give you more web traffic. This traffic is given to you by the search engines without any cost, it’s absolutely free traffic. The goal of search engine optimization is to reach the first page of the search results. If you can reach the top twenty on the search result page, you’ll get massive amounts of free web traffic. Search engine optimization is a must learn technique if you want a successful online business.

Why is Search Engine Optimization Important

Ninety percent of all web traffic comes from the search engines. If your website is not in the top twenty results, you are missing out on a lot of web traffic that could be coming to your website. If you are not receiving free web traffic from the search engines, you are spending a lot of money to advertise your online business, or you are probably not making any money online at all. Search engine optimization is very important to the survival of your online business.

Optimizing your website helps you three different ways. First of all; you must understand that optimizing your website is not just for the search engines, it is also to help your visitors move around your site with ease. If you create a search engine friendly website, you’ll also create a better website for your visitors making their experience much better on your site.

The second reason why search engine optimization is important is to rank higher in the search engines. By ranking on the first page of the search results with a certain keyword, you’ll be guaranteed lots of free web traffic.

The third reason why search engine optimization is important is because it delivers your website massive amounts on free web traffic.

All three reasons working together makes your online marketing efforts much easier to accomplish. Just to give you an idea of how great search engine optimization results can actually be; take a website that is receiving a hundred visits a day and see how profitable that site can be online. Then take a properly optimized website receiving two thousand or more visits a day. Your profits will surely be much higher with the optimized website, giving you a successful online business. The best part of this example is the fact that the optimized website received much more visits with totally free organic web traffic. Search engine optimization can be a lot of work to reach this point, but the efforts are well worth the work involved. You must master the technique of search engine optimization, it is crucial to your online success.

How to Optimize your Website

We have already discussed the fact that your website needs to be search engine friendly for not only the search engines but also for your potential customers arriving on your website. Your website needs to be easy to use and well organized. Make sure your pages are easy to get to by using categories and a site map.

Important – when using site maps do not list over ninety pages on this site map. To be safe, keep it at about seventy-five pages listed on your site map. You can be penalized by the search engines for having too many pages listed on your site map. To get around this problem, you are allowed to have sub-sitemaps or category pages. For example; on “learning methods online” you will find the topic “Internet marketing articles”. On this page I can list a lot of additional pages and it serves as a sub-site map. On my site map, it will have a category for “internet marketing articles”. Site maps are very important because this is usually the first place the search engine web crawlers look when exploring your website. Site maps basically tell the crawlers were to look or how to explore your website.

Your website also has to have attractive and unique content. If your content is not attractive, your readers will not visit or stay on your website. You have to be able to keep the interest of the reader while they are on your website. You will also want them to return to your site; therefore, you must offer them a reason to return. This is accomplished by providing good content that actually helps them with their problems. Your website must also have unique content or, you’ll never master search engine optimization on your website. You will need a minimum of twenty pages of good website content to attract visitors to your website. I recommend at least one hundred or more pages on your website being precise to your niche market.

Another way to design your website is by using competition as guidance when designing your website. Let’s say you want your website or a web page optimized for the keyword “internet marketing” (I recommend that you do not use this keyword due to it being highly competitive, it’s just an example). You key in the keyword internet marketing and the results come up on the search page results. Explore the first three websites to see how their website is designed and what keywords they are using to reach these top positions. What you will find in most cases is a well designed website, unique articles, and anchor text within the articles. Anchor text is words used in the article that have hidden links for other web pages. For some reason, the search engines really like anchor text in the articles. The main here is to find out why the other site is ranking high and do the same thing to compete with that site. Keep in mind this is not stealing or cheating, this is surviving in the online world.

To see what keywords other sites are using is simple. Once you arrive on the webpage that you want to explore, at the top of the page where the “file” is located look for the category “view”. Under the view you will see “source”. Click the “source” and you will see the html for this page. Look for the keyword list which is usually at the top and you will be able to view the keywords for that page. This is very easy to accomplish. You may find some sites hiding this information, but most of them do not!

While we are on the topic of keywords, you must be able to find good keywords that are not very competitive. There are a few ways you can accomplish this task. We have already mentioned how to explore the keywords on other websites, now we are going to find our own keywords.

To accomplish this task you may consider using some software. The first piece of software I want to mention is SEO Elite, which you have probably seen advertised all over the internet. This is a great piece of software but is also a little pricey. The cost of this software is about two hundred dollars. It will allow you to spy on your competition and find great keywords to use on your website. This software will also give you the page ranking and number placement of the site in the search engines. You can also use Rank Tracker, which does the same thing but is only about one hundred dollars. Both of these tools work great is should be used with your SEO efforts.

A couple of keyword tools I want to mention would include word tracker and keyword discovery. Both of these tools are great for finding great keywords for your website. Check out the prices and see which software is in your budget. Keep in mind if you use SEO elite or Rank Tracker, you will not need the other two keyword research tools. You need to also understand that this work can be done manually without this software, but the software makes this task much easier and will save you time.  

Before I go into how to optimize your website I want to tell you what you should not do during the process of optimizing your website.

You should never use spamming on your web pages or in the meta tags. You should never use hidden keywords on your web pages or hidden in the html. This is known as keyword stiffening. You should never repeat your key words at the bottom of the web page after there are several breaks in the content. You should never hide your key words in small print. You should never hide your keywords with the same color as your web page. All of this is known as spamming and you will get caught by the search engines for using this spam on your web pages. DO NOT get involved in this practice. This practice will hurt your online business way before you even get started. The key is to practice good SEO techniques, not to attempt to beat the search engines. You will get caught if you use spamming.

Course By: Tony Curles

Continue To Part Two

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