Lesson 1 – Introduction to SEO techniques

Search Engine Optimization. If you’re a web master, you’ve probably heard this phrase mentioned often. If you’re someone who has been doing web master work for years, you might not be very familiar with what search engine optimization (SEO) is.

That’s OK, as it’s not something that many people have learned about. While it’s not as common knowledge as it should be, SEO isn’t a very difficult subject to learn thoroughly enough. In fact, learning the techniques of SEO can actually be very easy. We’ll teach you all about SEO in this lesson ( Just kidding, we will need more lessons for this job ).

What is SEO?

SEO is search engine optimization. What does this mean? Well, it essentially means you are creating a site that is search engine friendly. Search engines, as you probably know, are responsible for a lot of your web site’s traffic. The more search engine friendly a site is, the greater the chance people using a search engine will find the site. Basically, by making your site SEO, you are increasing your traffic. That’s why SEO is a very important part of current web master work.

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Now that you know what SEO is, you’ll want to know how to apply it to your web site so that you, too, can reap the benefits. There are several SEO techniques to learn, and we’ll cover three very important ones that you can apply immediately to your site.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #1: Keywords and Key phrases

The most basic SEO technique is that of the use of keywords and key phrases. Keywords are basically words that a search engine spider ( basically a program which scans web sites and reports its findings back to the search engine database ) is trained to find. If these words are found, the site is more likely to catch the attention of the spider and get listed. Key phrases are just like keywords, except they are basically two or more words strung together. For instance, a common key phrase might be “cool web sites”. Using such a key phrase or key word enough can really help a site to become SEO friendly.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #2: Correct Titles

If you look at the top left of your web browser, you’ll notice a piece of text that states what site you are on and perhaps also gives a brief description of what the site is. This piece of text is known as the “Title” of a web page. The title is one of the first things a search engine spider will notice when visiting a site. Thus, it is important to make sure your web site has a meaningful title. The title should not include excessive amounts of keywords, and whatever keywords you do use should be relevant to the site at hand. Spiders have been trained to spot sites with excessive amounts of keywords and they will ignore such sites. So don’t ever overuse keywords. If you have a site dedicated to PRS electric guitars, an appropriate SEO title might be something like “PRS Electric Guitars.com – “ Your source for PRS guitars”.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #3: Keyword Density

There is such a thing as overusing keywords, and it can be worse than using no keywords at all in terms of getting ranked highly on a search engine. Keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the number of total words in a page. So if you have 500 total words and 10 keywords, you’d have 2% keyword density. An appropriate keyword density is anywhere between 2% and 7%.Anything more than this is considered keyword stuffing; anything less than this is considered too little to make an impact.

Lesson 1 in Review

In this first lesson on SEO, we’ve covered a lot of ground. You’ve learned the basic principals behind SEO and should now be able to apply those to your site.