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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the art and science of making your website both relevant and important in the eyes of the search engines in order to achieve a high ranking in their results. SEO can be complicated, time consuming and expensive. However, despite it's technical intricacies, there are a few basic SEO strategies any website owner can employ to increase your chances of a high ranking result. Best of all these SEO steps are free.


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Your primary goal in SEO is to create a site that is both relevant and important from the perspective of the search engines. Your two main weapons in your SEO arsenal are keywords and backlinks. Keywords create relevance. Backlinks create importance. These two things are the fundamental basis of SEO.

First, let's talk about keywords. Think about what you do when you want to find information online. You open up your favorite search engine, say Google, and then what? It's beautifully simple. You type in words related to what you're looking for. Think about that for a moment. When you boil it down the vast majority of all internet traffic is driven by text. Nothing more than words typed into a search field. It all starts with simple text phrases, also known as keywords. And that's where your SEO focus should begin.

Search engines send out spiders or robots to analyze the words you have on your website. They analyze your text in an effort to figure out what your website is all about. They use this information to determine how and when to display your website within their search results. Offering the right text to the search engine spiders is the key. This fact must not be ignored or trivialized. Gear your SEO efforts with this is mind.

The idea is to figure out what words your potential customers are searching for then use these keywords frequently within the copy of your website and in the html code upon which your pages are built. The more frequently you use these keywords the more relevant the search engines will consider your page. Of course you can't just use the keywords over and over or the search engines will consider your site spam. Also remember that the information on your site has to be useful and engaging once somebody finally arrives there or your SEO efforts will have been wasted.

Proper keyword analysis is vital to creating a winning keyword optimization strategy. First and foremost you must know what keywords you want to target. It's not as simple as finding the most popular keywords for your websites category. Good keyword analysis involves researching your niche completely and having a solid understanding of the benefits that your business offers to customers.

Keyword analysis can get easier by using the right SEO tools. Overture provides a free and easy to use keyword tool here: http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ry/suggestion/. The major limitation to this tool is that it will only tell you the number of times that a keyword(s) have been searched for in the previous month. Another website specifically designed to help you perform in-depth keyword analysis is Word Tracker, which you can visit here http://www.ezniche.com/data/article.php?l=58. Word Tracker is not free, however, the benefits easily outweigh the monthly fee because it's a far more powerful tool which produces much more usable information.

Developing a long term keyword strategy usually involves targeting keyword phrases rather than single keywords. Using keyword phrases allows you to target a specific audience. Additionally, the competition for single keywords is too great. For example, if your website sells furniture you wouldn't want to focus all your keyword optimization on 'furniture'. Just go to Google type in 'furniture' and you'll see why.

Instead, think of what's unique about your furniture business. Perhaps you specialize in vintage oak furniture. By broadening your keyword optimization to the phrase 'vintage oak furniture' you're now reaching a specific target audience that's looking for that exact item and you're also targeting the highly contested single keyword 'furniture'.

Only target one keyword phrase per page, unless your keywords have very little search competition. If you need to target more than one keyword or keyword phrase create a new page for each one. Keep your wordcount per page between 100-1000. Less than 100 is not enough text food for the search engine spiders. 1000 or more and it's going to be too long for your visitors. Also be sure that the links and headings within your html code are keyword rich as spiders will look at these to determine what your site is about.

Looking at the text of your entire website a good average keyword density to shoot for is right around 2%. For example, one of the keywords I've optimized this article for is 'SEO'. The keyword density, or how often the word 'SEO' appears in this article is 1.9%. Enough to make it relevant to search engines, but not so much that you feel like you're reading it in every sentence.

Remember that there are two main factors in SEO, relevance and importance. Keywords create relevance. Backlinks create importance.

In-depth keyword analysis is a vital step in creating a winning, long term keyword optimization strategy.

Next time we'll talk about how to create the right kind of backlinks. Best of luck with your SEO efforts.