Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips - step by step

There are so many websites all over the internet so it’s essential to promote and optimize your website. A new website needs to be visible to search engines. Before submitting your site to search engines it is very important to optimize your website. Following main steps are done by SEO experts called - onpage optimization. If you can not afford a search engine optimization service, make sure to follow our few SEO tips to have your web site well optimized for the top placement in search engines. Realize that onpage and offpage optimization is not a short time process; you have to do your best to be the best.

Step 1. - Analyze your competition
The best way to start optimizing your web site is analyze your competition. Take a look at the web pages that currently have top rankings (Top 10) on Google for targeted keywords and try to find out what these pages have done to get these rankings.

- analyze the first top ten web sites related to your branch,
- analyze keywords they are using,
- look at their source code, meta tags,
- look at their keyword density,
- look at their comment tag, alt tags, title tag,
- internal and external links on their websites,
- check the PageRank,
- look how many sites linking to them (link:www.sitename.com)
- check out the quality and link popularity of sites that are linking to your competitors (link popularity tool is at http://searchengineoptimization-submission.com/link_popularity.php),
- look how many pages they have (site index tool at http://searchengineoptimization-submission.com/indexed_pages.php ),
You can compare the results with your website, especially the PR and the link popularity. After all you can tell is it easy to beat your competition or it is not.

Step 2. – Start to improve your website with quality content
Place something interesting to your site e.g. list of top 10 sites in your niche, list of experts …
When optimizing your website always use keyword in the meta tags which are reflected in your page. It is not going to help your search engine ranking if the page has nothing to do with the topic.

Step 3. Choose the RIGHT keywords
As mentioned before, analyze your competition but never use the same keyword, especially if you start with a new site target to less competitive keyword phrases. There are two great resources for finding out the most effective keywords. inventory.overture.com and wordtracker.com or http:// searchengineoptimization-submission.com/keyword_research_tool.htm

Step 4.Creating meta tags - TITLE Tag
The most important tag is the Title tag, because it is in the head section of your website and many search engines use it. Title tag should be short (about 14 words), descriptive and to the point. The title is appeared on first line in the search engines.

example: affordable search engine optimization | link building service

Step 5. Creating the DESCRIPTION Tag
The next important meta tag is description tag. It describes content of your web page
- shouldn’t be longer than 120 characters,
- description is for the search engines not for the viewers to see,

example:

Step 6. Creating meta tags - KEYWORD Tag
- use the most important keywords that your website represents
- we recommend to use 5 keywords separated by a commas
- one keyword should have 1 - 3 words
example:

Step 7.Creating meta tags - ROBOT Tags

If you want to not index your website type the following:
Step 8. - Check your website URL
Your website should be finished without errors:
- have a good and optimized design and layout,
- no spelling mistakes,
- no broken links,
- no html mistakes,
- have a site map,
- have simple linking structure,
- no full flash website is recommended

Step 9. - Submit your website to search engines and directories
Submit your website into the most important search engines; it brings you the most of traffic. Make sure to submit your URL for free to google.com, yahoo.com (you must register first), altavista.com, alltheweb.com, excite.com, lycos.com, webcrawler.com, alexa.com, jayde.com, whatuseek.com, dmoz.org (The Open Directory powers core directory services for some the most popular portals and search engines on the Web, including AOL Search, Netscape Search, Google directory, Yahoo directory, Lycos, DirectHit, and HotBot, MSN and hundreds of others).
DMOZ (free) and Yahoo Directory listings (paid) are tremendously valuable. There are a lot more free and paid search engines and directories to submit, all you have to do is search for quality pages and directories to build your link popularity.

Step 10. - Build your link popularity (offpage optimization)
By submitting your website URL to the search engines and directories you are building your link popularity. Link Popularity is the number and quality of other websites that link to your site. Top rankings in search engines depend on your link popularity. It can be done with creating a quality non-reciprocal and reciprocal links from related web sites and directories, blogs, forum sites… My next article will be about some of the best link building techniques.

Robert Toth is working as freelance search engine optimizer and offers you Affordable search engine optimization, Link building campaign and professional web site templates(http://www.1stwebdesign.sk/). You may republish this article freely as long as the resource links and the author info are included.