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SEO - Search Engine Optimization - Getting Started

I came across the term "Search Engine Optimization" about a year ago when I was trying to help a friend of mine manage some of his websites. His website administrator at the time was a sort of genius in the field of SEO, so I started to ask questions and got a quick lesson getting me started in the learning process of building a SEO website. In this intro article I am going to explain SEO, and give you a few starter tips that I think will help you begin to get placement in the search engines.

1. What is SEO, and how does it work - Search engine optimization is the process of adjusting you website to get the attention on the major search engines such as Google, yahoo, and MSN. The search engines crawlers look at the content of every website and sort them for most important to least important.

2. NO NOT BUILD A FULL FLASH WEBSITE! The search engines cannot read flash, so in order to even stand a chance you have to have html in your website. Top three forms for your website in my personal opinion are html, php, and Coldfusion. The search engines can easily see all of these three programming codes. I'm not saying you can't have any flash, I am just saying make sure that the majority of your site is in html, php, or Coldfusion.

3. Page Title - You page title is one of the most powerful items on your website and usually the most over looked. Most people will put in the title "Welcome to website.com" and that is it. You need to find out the key search terms for your website and fill your website and title with those keywords.

EXAMPLE: "Buy Computer Parts: Computer Parts store, Laptops, Desktop Pc's" This is a SEO Friendly website with it's top 4 search terms in the title.

4. Keywords - Finding the most searched keywords is not as hard as you would think. Yahoo has a free keyword tool .

This tool allows you to put in a keyword and it will give you a list in order of all the top search terms under that keyword, and how many times they have been searched last month. This is a valuable tool because you can see which keywords are going to bring traffic to your site. It only shows you how many times the search term was looked at in Yahoo, so I multiply it by 3, so that I get a round figure with Google and MSN included, so it the tool say 1500 in the last month I estimate 4500 for all 3 search engines. This a tool you will use often while doing your SEO research for your website.

5. Use both high traffic and broad search terms - when picking you search terms you can pick a few of the high traffic search terms, but also be sure to look and broad 3 and 4 word search terms that the major companies might not be interested in.