Do you realize that if you manage your website, SEO tools, and pay-per-click tools, you can literally have as many leads as you want from your website? I assume that a website should convert approximately 5% of the viewers to doers, taking some kind of action that you want them to take. So, all we have to do is make sure the website does convert viewers to doers, and then we make sure we’ve got the right amount of traffic arriving at the website. All quite manageable. Today, we’re mainly talking about how to get the traffic to your website through Search Engine Optimization, SEO.

Here is a list of the best tools I’ve found to do SEO and a quick review of some of the top issues for SEO. Most of these tools are either free, or can be tried for free before buying

Most search engines are looking at your site to find relevant search words. How relevant determines your eventual search engine position.

How do they determine relevancy? Although every search engine has slightly different rules, here are some of the key ideas. Keep in mind, they could change tomorrow. Search engines are continually changing because just as soon as they determine how to find the relevant search words on your site, someone finds a way around their rules. Then search engines change the rules again.

A key word usually has to show up in each of the following areas of your site, with a density that falls within a range that search engine would like to see. They also like to see the words at a certain position in that area, usually at or near the beginning of these areas:

Areas search engines look at:

1)Meta tags (title, description, and keywords) (NOTE: I’m told that most search engines don’t consider meta tags any longer, but I keep seeing my keywords pop up from the meta tags).

2)Body text of the site

3)Headlines

4)Alternate text behind the graphics

5)Links, and link text

How do you choose the right keywords?

Here’s a big warning: Consider what people are looking for, not who you are or what your product is. For me, I would rather be found for “small business help” than for my company name, The Leader’s Perspective. Obviously I want people to find me, if by chance they are looking for me by name, but just think about this:

Are you getting high quality, targeted traffic to your website?

This is the key ingredient to online success: high quality, targeted traffic to your website. Chances are if you’re reading this you already have a website. But your website isn’t getting the amount of traffic you want it to?

You may have tried purchasing cheap traffic solutions for your website? It can cost as low as $10 for 1000 hits to your website. But the quality of the traffic is worthless. The traffic must be targeted to your website.

Get ready for some essential SEO tips!

Search engine optimisation is the fine art of optimising your website so it appears at the top of the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN etc). For example; If your website sells pine furniture then you’re going to want to appear on the first page of Google for the search term “Pine Furniture”.

Why optimise your website? For one simple reason… profit.

If your website has been optimised for search engines it will appear higher up in the search results when compared to your competitors.

Put simply; this means more targeted traffic to your website. More targeted traffic equates to more sales. You can probably guess what more sales means? That’s right… more profit.

Is your website search engine friendly? Your website must be friendly to the search engines if you want the search engines to put your website at the top of the results.

As I’m sure you’re aware; all websites are built using a scripting language called HTML. The HTML of your website must adhere to very strict standards in order for search engines to rank your website highly.

The Word Wide Web Consortium sets out very strict standards when it comes to HTML code. Luckily there’s a very useful tool that can check the HTML of your website instantly. I’ll come to this later…

Is your website communal? Have you heard the old saying; it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Well, the same applies to websites.

The more websites that link back to yours, the better ranking you’ll get in the search results. In other words; the more popular your website is (the more websites it knows), the better you’ll rank.

Do you remember that tool I mentioned earlier? The same tool will also tell you instantly how many websites link back to yours, and therefore how popular your website is.

In conclusion… I’ve covered two basic, but very crucial ways of optimising your website; keep the HTML compliant and increase the number of websites that link to you.

For a really quick and convenient way to find out if your website is search engine friendly get your free report that’ll tell you how to improve your website.

SEO tips are flowing around all over the place. I have been trying too keep up to date with all the new trends, programs and secrets. Let me tell you, it can get quite overwhelming sometimes. This seems like a great time to stop reading and give up right? Well… I would not have been writing this if that was the case.

The problem I found with most of my friends and colleagues (even with myself not too long ago) when trying to dominate Google, was the mass amounts of SEO tips out there at the moment. Like a big percentage of people in our society nowadays, I suffer from ADD and all this info can pull my mind of track quite easily. For example, I sign up to some new SEO forum, grab a hold of the first tutorial that looks hopeful, and move ahead.

So now with this tutorial for example, you go ahead and follow the first step (if it is a step-by-step based tutorial and not one of those vague summaries). This step tells you to do some niche research. It recommends some program/system which they found useful, but for some reason you feel this product is not the of the highest quality. Now you start research on the best niche program and after 2 hours of reading through reviews you have found the one that fits your needs. Now in the niche program it references another program and the cycle starts all over again. See how easily this process can pull you in so many directions that you end up reading for months and months and never get down to some serious SEO. Dis can become quite demotivating.

The approach I learned the hard way, was something I took from my studying days. You can say it is a form of “SEO meditation”, if you will. I take one tutorial, do everything step by step, exactly as the writer of the lesson explained, even if it sometimes feels a bit tedious. I mean, if it worked well for him, who is to say, it wont work for you. I do still sometimes seem to dose of in different directions, but as soon as I open an extra tab to start some Google searching rampage to find the perfect program, I stop, cancel that thought, close the tab and pull myself back to the main tutorial. This is quite hard sometimes, but with enough practice it can radically improve your “SEO focus”.

After you have finished the tutorial once and you feel it’s worth continuing this approach, then you can trail and error every step in some different way/method/program/system etc. Again, there is an overload of SEO tips out there that are just waiting to be mastered, so there is no reason to ever use the excuse that “nothing seems to work” or “it’s too hard”. The problem is focus. You need to focus, focus, focus. Keep with one program, improve on it, or move on to the next. But always try and get into the habit of finishing what you started!

The tips listed below are the basis for any good organic SEO campaign and can be utilized by any webmaster as the basis for optimizing their website.

1) Keyword Research

Choosing the right keywords is the most important factor in the success of your SEO campaign. Finding the keyword phrases that people are actually typing into the search engines to find your website’s product or services is job number one. Don’t just trust what you think people are typing in but utilize a keyword research tool to find out what the most searched for keywords are for your websites content and target those phrases.

2) Add Relevant Keywords to the Title Tag

Once you have completed your keyword research you will need to place your relevant keywords into the

Title section of your Web page.

3) Use Heading tags.

Proper use of the heading tags will enhance the use of your keywords. At the beginning of your Web page, include an H1 header tag that uses the keywords you have chosen to use in your page title. This is not only good for search engines but is good for letting your visitors know what the page they are viewing is about.

4) Place your keywords throughout the pages content.

Once you have found your keywords and placed them in your Title tag and H1 tag, the next step is to add them to the main body content of your Web page where appropriate.

5) Use ALT tags for your images.

ALT tags when used with images provide a description of the what the image is in the event that the image doesn’t load for some reason and provides a description for users that browse the Internet using text to speech programs.

ALT tags are also read by the major search engines to help them determine what a Web page is about and provides an extra spot to use your targeted keywords to gain recognition in the major search engines.

6) Use text links for your navigation menu.

Where possible use text links for your navigation bar as search engines have an easier time following text links than menus created with graphic or Javascript menus and include your keywords in your text link menu.

If you have used images or JavaScript for your navigation menu include a text link in the footer section of your Web page’s that point to a site map page so search engines will still be able to easily find all your content.

7) Implement a site map page.

A site map page is a page that can be used to help search engines a secondary route to navigate through your site by containing text links that point to all the pages of your website.

If you have a large website then adding text links to your site map isn’t feasible for every page so adding text links to the most important parts of your site will still allow Google to crawl your site. If you have a large site, consider submitting a site map file to the major search engines to allow them to access all your content.

Add keywords to your URL’s and file names.

When creating a Web page try to fit in the keywords you are going to target for that page into the file name so your keywords will show up in the URL of the Web page. Adding keywords to your website’s URL’s will help search engines and visitors understand what your pages are about.

Instead of calling a page “/article#105.html” try to give it a bit more of a descriptive file name that includes the keywords you are targeting if the page is about golf putters then a file name such as “great-golf-putters.html” will have a much better chance of being ranked in the search engines than the first example that merely uses “article#105.html” which isn’t very descriptive to visitors or search engines.

As a quick example of how important it is to include your keywords in your Web page’s URL’s do a quick search on Google for any keyword term and you will see that almost all of the websites on the first page have included their keywords in their Web page’s file names so their keywords show up in their websites URL’s. This should give you a good indication of how important it is to include relevant keywords in your Web pages file names.

9) Acquire backlink’s for your website.

Acquiring backlink’s to your site once you have finished your on-site optimization will be your next goal. What you will need to do is find relevant sites that fit with the overall theme of your site and ask that website if they will give a backlink to your website.

Essentially the more links you have pointing to your site the higher recognition Google will give to your site. Google feels that each link coming to a website is a vote in support of that particular website and the more links a certain website has the higher Google will rank it in its search results over a competing website that has little or no links pointing at it.

Not all links are created equal though. If you get links from website’s that have been around for along time and have a lot of backlink’s themselves than Google will treat these links as meaning more than a backlink that comes from a website that has very few backlink’s and hasn’t been around on the Internet very long.

That’s why its important to get links from well established website’s like the DMOZ the Open Directory Project which Google uses to build its own directory listings from and Yahoo! Directory which has been around for a very long time. One link from either of these two directories will count a lot more than acquiring thousands of links from sites that have little to no backlink’s coming to the them.

If you can acquire one-way backlinks to your website without having to give a reciprical link in return then the search engines will give more weight to these links then they will to a simple exchange of links between two websites. Directories are a great source of acquiring one-way links to your website.

Getting backlink’s to your site is a time consuming and often tedious process but if you stick with it you will start to see the benefits for your website as your website climbs up in the search engines results.

10) Include your keywords in your links anchor text.

Anchor text refers to the visible text portion of a link. The major search engines places great emphasis on a links anchor text and it is a very important part of the major search engines ranking algorithms to give relevance to what is written in the anchor text of a link as it helps search engines and visitors figure out what the page being linked to is about.

So the next time you are linking to a page on your website, use a descriptive keyword that is also being targeted on the page that is being linked to. This will help your ranking in the major search engines for that particular keyword phrase and will also help your visitors figure out before they click on your link what your page will be about.

Conclusion:

As you can see the basis for any good SEO campaign is good keyword research and where you use those keywords on your Web page. The other part of a good SEO campaign is acquiring links back to your site from other website’s on the Internet.