SEOs Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple

SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple


Phil Coleman
Copyright 2009





SEO Storm
Search Engine Optimisation made simple



SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
Getting high rankings in the search engines is a massive subject. It’s called SEO
which is Search Engine Optimisation.

So you’re basically optimising your website to keep the search engines happy, or
more importantly, keep searchers happy. And if the searchers are happy with
you, the search engines will place you higher in their results.

Search Engine Sanity

When you search for something on the web, what do you want to happen? You
want to see a page of results, relating exactly to what you searched for, right? Of
course you do. Do you want some of the results to have nothing to do with what
you’re looking for? Of course not. What would be the point in that?

Well, the search engines understand that you and everyone else want the same

thing. Extremely relevant results. If you don’t find what you want, you’ll move on
to another search engine, won’t you?

That’s where keywords come in. You optimise your site for certain keywords. You
include content, based around the same keywords. If you’re an affiliate, sell
products which are also based around your keywords.

When the search engine spiders arrive at your site, they check the titles,
metatags, read the content, check all your links and check how many other sites
link to yours.

Google is also interested in the Page Rank (PR) or social importance of your site
and the sites which link to you. The higher the PR of these sites the more love
you get from Google, simply because if big important sites are linking to you, it
makes sense that your site must be good quality and relevant. The only way to
increase your Page Rank is to get other sites to link to you. (Backlinks)

Page Rank is logarithmic and varies from 0 to 10. A page rank of 8 is better than
2.

So obviously, the highest ranking sites are normally the ones with good relevant
content which is updated regularly and has lots of high PR back-links.

There are various arguments about how important page rank really is. There are
those that say it’s unimportant and obviously those that say it’s incredibly
important. My advice? Don’t worry unduly about it. Just stick to what I’m showing
you here and everything will fall into place.


How to optimise your site

SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
There are 2 main parts to SEO. On-page, which is the actual content and html of
your site. And off-page, which is about your linking strategy.

I’m going to start with an example of how to use on-page optimisation, so you’ll
stand more chance of ranking in the search engines. We’ll get to off-page a little
later.

The keyword I use here can be changed for whichever keyword you want to
optimise for. The principles will still be the same.

You’re also going to learn how to check your keyword, to see your chances of
building a site, which you can get onto the first page of Google. If your keyword is
ultra competitive, you’ll find it very difficult to get ranked. Because of this it’s best
to try and get ranked for a less competitive keyword.

I’m sure you would rather have a few hundred targeted visitors a month to start
off with than NONE!

Work through these examples with me on your PC. Let’s start by using the
weight loss example again. To try and rank for the term weight loss would be
very difficult. It’s such a broad, popular phrase and there are so many
established sites.

However, if we go to Wordtracker.


And type in the phrase weight loss, you’ll see something like this.

Scroll
down
the page
SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
and you’ll see these results.

Let’s take “weight loss workouts” for this example. You can and should try other
keywords in the niche you’re interested in, using the techniques I’m about to
show you. The more research you do, the more successful you’re likely to be.
Seriously. And, the more research you do, the easier it will get and the more
sense it will make.

“weight loss workouts” had 100 searches last month according to Wordtracker.
Doesn’t sound like a lot but you can multiply that figure by at least 4 for google
and then add all the other search engines.

If we search “weight loss workouts” in Google, we’ll see 45,900 results when we
use quotes.

The thing to remember is you are not competing directly with 45,900 other sites.
No, no, no. Let me show you something to get my point across.
SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple

Go back to your search results in Google. Now click on Preferences just to the
right of the search box. You should see this screen.

Change the Number of Results to 100. Then click on Save Preferences. You
should then see this:














SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
Click OK and when Google takes you back to the search results, scroll down to
the bottom of the page. Click on the number 10 which will obviously take you to
the tenth page of results for your search phrase.

You’ll see something like this at the top of the page. So in this example, you can
see there are only 581 real results. NOT 47,300. This is because the rest of the
results are not as relevant.



Just to cheer you up even more, scroll to the bottom of the page and take a look.
Do you really think those results are serious competition for you? And results like
this are not confined to the last page. You’ll find them all through the results
pages.

SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
Can you now see that by getting your SEO as perfect as you can, it could be
easier than you thought, to rank higher than you thought? Good news eh?

That’s fine I hear you say, but what about the top search results on the first
page? Their SEO will be perfect right? Well, let’s have a look shall we?

A good plan of action is to analyze the highest ranked websites on Google to see
what it is they are doing and then make sure you do it even better. This will
hopefully get you a better ranking than them.


The first thing to look at is if the result is from a homepage or a subpage.
This example (look at the green text at the bottom of the listing) is a sub page
because allwomenstalk.com is the home page and
3-step-approach-to-best-weight-loss-workouts/ is the sub page.

That’s good news because subpage listings aren’t as strong as subpages. A
home page will normally get preferential treatment over a subpage. There’s a
chance that if we optimised our home page for this keyword, we could beat this
listing. Don’t get too excited yet though, because there’s a lot more to it than that.

If you are using Firefox as your browser go here:













SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple



Download the SEO for Firefox plug-in tool for SEO analysis. It’s unbelievably
useful. Just click on the big link when you’re on the site like the picture above.
On the next page you can just scroll down to the Download & Installation
Instructions: and you’ll see the Click Here to install
text.
If you are not currently using Firefox, you’ll find a link to download it just above

the other link. Firefox is really popular and I personally think it’s worth
downloading so you can use the SEO tool.
You can usually run Firefox as well as Internet Explorer, or whichever browser
you currently use. So you won’t have to get rid of your current browser.
Bookmark the download page for later, as it has some instructions and info on it.
OK, so if you’re running Firefox and you’ve clicked on the download link for the
tool you’ll see this:


SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
Just wait till the Install link is live then click on it and follow the instructions. You’ll
be asked to restart Firefox then you can use the tool.



Once you’ve downloaded and installed the tool you can right click on an empty
part of a website and choose SEO for Firefox, then Lookup This Page. You will
then see the box above with all the useful info.

Now go back to: and scroll
down to read a summary of what the info means.

Just remember the info is just a guide. It will help you to see how established,
popular and optimised a site is. Which will help you decide if it’s worth trying your
luck with certain keywords.

There are other ways to check the info found in the Firefox SEO tool.

Another way to check Page rank is to use an online tool like:

Just copy and paste the address of the site you’re researching. In this example,
the website is PR3. That’s good for us as PR3 is not very high. It would be far
SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
harder to knock a PR 7 or 8 off their spot. They’re sort of internet royalty at that
rank!

For another way to check backlinks go here:



Once again copy and paste the website address into the box. Remember to copy
the homepage address, not the subpage address. This will tell us how many
back links the site has. In this case, at the time of writing, they have 5,094.




That’s quite a lot. But some sites have tens of thousands of backlinks.

Remember, the point of this research is to see whether you stand a chance of
ranking for your keywords. As you practice and gain more experience, you’ll be
able to make more and more accurate decisions. Nothing is written in stone and
nothing is guaranteed.

Anyway, go back to the first page of results again and click on the first site.

SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple

On the main browser menu (as below) click on View then Page Source








You’ll see this open in a new window.

This is the HTML for the site you’ve just clicked on. And it can tell us so much
about how well the site is optimised for the search engines. Don’t let all the
HTML worry you. You haven’t got to understand it all. I’m going to show you what
SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
to look for, using this site as an example. YOU will then be able to do the same
on any other site. How cool is that?

What you will find might just shock you. I’m sure you would presume that all sites
on Google’s first page of results, are perfectly optimised and therefore impossible
for you to beat. Right?

Wrong!

Some
of them will be. But the number is far less than you would think. That’s why
it’s so important to do your research. The people who presume they can’t
compete for first page listings really are wrong. It’s possible, in fact it’s highly
likely in some cases, but it does take time and research. And the pay off is huge.

Let’s have a look at some of the main things you would expect to see in the
HTML of a well optimised site. Don’t worry about this. It’s all covered in detail on
the videos and it will all make more sense once you’ve gone over a few
examples

On-Page SEO

Title Tag

The title tag is probably the most important of these factors. Look for this in the
above website example:

<title> 3-Step Approach to Best Weight Loss Workouts | All Women&#8217;s
Talk</title>

It’s the title tag. It should contain your main keyword, which in this case it does
(highlighted in green). It is the selection of text that usually appears in the top
navigation bar of an internet web browser as well as the link in a good search
engine result entry. It should always contain your most important keywords and if
needed your brand as well. Generally they will be in the following format.

{keyword 1}{keyword 2} | {brand}

If you have to write titles for your pages try to keep them short and sweet.
Definitely below 180 characters and ideally below 100, including spaces or
special characters. Always spell and grammar check your titles because they will
be your links in the Google search results.

Meta Description Tags

SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
Your Meta description is also important. It should be between 80-200 characters
and contain a few sentences describing your page. Ensure you include your
keywords and make sure it reads well.

Meta Keyword Tags

The keywords tag should look something like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="????????????????????????????">
Your keywords would go where the ?’s are in this example.

The Meta keywords tag is simply a comma delimited list of your site’s keywords.
You should use 100-200 characters which usually equates to around 10
keywords/keyphrases. Always use words relevant to the page, which means
using keywords that appear in the content of the page they are attached to.

Our research site doesn’t have meta keyword tags. When you research other
sites, this is a great way to find out what keywords your competitors are using.

Header Tags

Look at <h1 id="mark"> 3-Step Approach to Best Weight Loss Workouts </h1>

Your keyword should be within the <h1> header tags. In this example it is.
(highlighted in green again)

<h2> and <h3> Tags

Very similar to your header tags but more like sub header tags. The header tag is

the headline on your page, <h2> tags are your sub headlines. <h3> tags could
be your bullet points. As a guide, you should have one <h1>, 2 or 3 <h2> and 4
to 6 <h3> tags.

Bold Tags

Another important aspect of on page optimization is bolding your keyword
through your webpage copy. Like this: <b>weight loss workouts</b> Just bold
each of your keywords once per page.

You can use italics too, like this: <i> weight loss workouts</i>

<alt> Image Tags

If you have images on your website, and you should have, you’ll need to use
<alt> image tags. Always name your images after your keyword ie:

SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
weight-loss-workouts.jpg
weight-loss-workouts2.jpg
weight-loss-workouts3.jpg

The <alt> image tags work like the other tags, so:
<alt> weight-loss-workouts2.jpg</alt>

To check if our research site is using alt image tags just right click on a picture
and click Properties. You’ll see a box like the one below.

Under Image Properties you’ll see Alternate Text: 3-Step Approach to Best
Weight Loss Workouts. This is the alt tag for that picture.

The idea is that you’re giving the search engines even more examples of your
keyword. Simple.

Another quick on-page optimization tip.

Always use your keyword near the very beginning of your copy and right at the
end. On our research site they don’t seem to have done this.

SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple
We can see from all this that our research site is not optimised as well as it could
be. If you take all the above and apply it to your site, you’ll be building on a solid
foundation from the start.

Analyze the top 4 or 5 sites for your main keyword, then do the same for your
other keywords. Yes it takes a little effort, but it will pay off in the long run.

You may find that all the top sites for your keyword have a high page rank and
are well optimized. If this is the case you should pick new keywords. Once your
site is established you can always try and go after the more competitive
keywords.

Make it easy for yourself when you’re starting out. Get your research and SEO
right first time and you WILL see success. You’d be amazed how few people do
this properly.

There’s another great tool you can use to find out what your competitors are

doing. Knowing what keywords they are using can be especially useful. A great
site to use for this is
www.spyfu.com



Just type a keyword into the search box, click on search and you’ll see a page of
info as in the above example. It includes the Cost per click range, average clicks
a day, search results and how many people are advertising using the keyword.

If you look further down on the right of the screen, you’ll see a list of keywords
(below). All this info can be added to your research. You can subscribe to spyfu
(at a cost) and get loads more functionality.
SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple

Off Page SEO

Off-page optimisation is all about link building. A back-link is quite simply a link to
your site on someone else’s site.

All of the techniques in the Making You Richer unit called Free Traffic Methods,
will build links to your site.

The more you get, the more it will help your SEO. And the higher the page rank
of the site giving you a backlink, the better.

So now you should be able to search engine optimise your own sites. You will
learn more with experience but if you apply what you’ve learnt in Making You
Richer, you’ll be ahead of the pack right away.






SEO Storm Search Engine Optimisation made simple

Phil Coleman
Copyright 2009