Search Engine Optimization is an interesting topic since it seems that everyone and their brother has a different idea on how it actually works. Today I hope to demystify some of the ideas around SEO and show you some ideas that have worked for me in the past and even some other techniques that are rather effective.

One of the first things that people immediately want with a website is having it on the front page of Google. I mean, who wouldnt want that? With Google dominating the search engine market, its definitely a good place to be. But how exactly do you get there? Well firstly, things have changed since the days of Netscape and needing those meta tags in your websites header. If you want to go real basic there are a few things that you can do (that you should be doing anyway).

The title tag in your header is a pretty important. Google really likes titles, and uses them to differentiate each of your pages, so make sure that the title on each page is unique. If you use the same title for each page, search engines will think each page is about the same thing.


The header tags are a really simple, but pretty effective way to optimize your site. When the Googlebots crawl your site, they look at the headers and index each page accordingly. Each page should have an h1 tag as its "page title".


Although Google is smart enough to weed through your sites content and work its magic on it, having the description and content meta tags for each page can be of some help. Here you want a decent description of your site and some good keywords. The description will be used as the description of your site when it appears on google. Google has a really good keyword tool that allows you to plug in keywords and it'll tell you how many people are searching for those particular keywords. Unless your'e getting tons of traffic already, you probably want to find some that have a good mix between advertiser competition and the monthly search volume.


If your site is pretty static and doesnt change all that much, you probably want to add a blog to it. Google and other search engines absolutely love fresh content. If the content on your site doesnt change all that much, then google will index it, and when its googlebots return, there wont be anything new for them to index and they'll just pass right on by.


Yes Im looking at you guy that has that invisible div at the bottom of his page trying to cram in as much as he can hoping that it will help. Well guess what, it doesnt help. This is called keyword stuffing and very outdated. Years ago such practices would help you get a better page ranking, but Google no longer gives good rankings to such practices. Instead you should focus on writing rich content for your website that uses keywords intelligently.


Having other sites that link back to you is a really powerful component to SEO and probably one of the techniques that takes the most effort. When sites start linking back to you, then your websites integrity will increase thusly causing positive side effects to your page rank. All in all, its basically a popularity contest. But in this case, you need to be popular with other popular sites. If your'e a professional blogger, see if you can guest blog on some other sites or blogs and see if they will let you link back to your site. If your'e a freelance developer, see if your client will let you put your name/company in the footer of their site as a small advertising plug. It's all about establishing a network of links that point at your site.


With the explosion of twitter, facebook, and other Social Networking giants, getting your blog out there is easier than ever. Get a twitter account and start tweeting about your interests. If these happen to be relevant to your website or blog, think about tweeting when you make a new post. If people like it, word about your blog will spread like wild fire. The more people you tell, the more the word about your blog will spread around.


Take a look at the URL at the top for this blog post. See how its nice looking - organized, logical, and free of query parameters? Search engines absolutely love URLs like this. When you add in messy query parameters like ?postTitle=LookAtMyPostGuys, not only is it not visually appealing, but search engines have a harder time indexing and processing it.


Google provides everyone with two very useful tools free of charge: Google Analytics and Webmasters Tools. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that you can use to track site visits, where people that are visiting your site are located, their browser/OS of choice, and pretty much anything else that youd want to know. All you need to do is sign up and embed a little javascript snippet on your landing page and you're good to go. Webmaster Tools on the other hand does some deeper operations. This is where you can submit your site to google and tell google how often you want it to crawl your site. Once it starts crawling your site, it will spit back information about keywords, outside links to your site, and where your site ranks on Google for particular search terms. One of the important things you want to do here is make sure to upload a site map. This way the Googlebots have a nice map to follow to index your page better.

Hopefully this has been a decent overview of how to get going with simple, but fairly effective SEO techniques. Its all about creating rich content and sharing it with the rest of the internet. If you can do that and have a website that has a friendly SEO design, you're good to go.