The acronym “SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, so saying “SEO Optimization” is actually redundant. Most commonly reffered to simply as SEO, this is a practice by which a website is designed around a series of principals that will improve its ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs.)

This is inarguably one of the most efficient methods for driving traffic to a site, and also the cheapest. It is widely practiced, used to at least some degree by almost every internet marketer, and is also the basis for many professional firms which offer their services to all range of businesses.

SEO, as far as I’m concerned, is need-to-know information for anyone seriously looking to make money online.

In this article, I’ll break down the fundamentals of SEO – optimization for search engines, keyword targeting, Google bombing, the whole nine yards.

SEO: Optimization For Search Engines

When considering SEO, keep in mind what a search engine actually is, and how it’s designed to function.

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_(computing)

an application that searches for, and retrieves, data based on some criteria, especially one that searches the Internet for documents containing specified words
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/search_engine

A computer program that searches websites and then indexes them using the information it has found.
oldweb.uwp.edu/library/2003/intro/mod3gloss.htm

Search engines are designed to find, categorize and index all the information on the internet, to assist people in finding the what they want. In large part, they have actually become the basis of the entire Internet. If you want to find specific information, you search for it in Google.

For this reason, even with zero optimization, certain websites will naturally come up for certain queries, and always listed in the order of the most relevant information. In a nutshell:

• If you search for “red apples” the first results shown  will be the most closely related information to red apples on the Internet, that the search engines are aware of.
• After the most relevant pages, all the pages that mention red apples are displayed, in order of greatest authority.
• A website, even if it is has great authority, will never appear in a search for red apples, if it has nothing to do with red apples and in no way mentions the term.

With SEO, optimization of a website enables us to manipulate the parameters a search engines uses when distinguishing the relevant content from the irrelevant content. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, it alows us to easily, cheaply, and effectively gain hundreds of thousands, even millions of targeted viewers. This is a Godsend from a marketing standpoint.

On the other, we are essentially sabotaging the entire basis of the search engine structure. Top search results are no longer guaranteed to be the most relevant information; they are now comprised of the most effectively optimized information. Whether or not this is a practice you personally condone or chose to use is entirely up to you.

Fundamentals of Optimization

Keyword Targeting

The content of your website and the keywords you target play a big part of SEO. If you’re doing a search for “red apples,” one of the first things a search engine will check is whether or not the words “red apple” are found in any of its indexed websites.

This makes “red apple” a keyword (or technically a keyword phrase, but they’ve come to mean the same thing.) In this context, a keyword may be defined as:

A word or phrase used to focus an online search and to target advertising.
www.adserversolutions.com/adserver/adterms2.html

A word or phrase that a user believes is relevant to the information he or she is seeking. The user enters keywords into an online search form. The search engine then examines each record in its database to find those documents that match the keywords. …
www.elms.edu/departments/library/AcademicReferenceResources/GlossaryLibTerms.htm

When utilizing SEO, optimization for specific keywords plays a huge part. If you have a website about dogs, for example, there’s a couple of things to consider when choosing your keywords:

1. If someone Googles “dog,” your site will come up, it’ll just be about the millionth result.
2. You’ll spend the rest of your life trying to rank for the keyword “dog” so don’t even bother.
3. Instead, specialize. Limit the subject of your site to something specific: “Your First Dog,” “Afghan Hound Dog,” “Dog breeding how to,” etc. Each of these is what’s known as a niche.

You don’t need an entire niche website to rank well for a single keyword, but the point is: you have the research the actual keyword phrases people type into the search engines, and optimize your website for them. The best way to do this is:

• Include your keyword in the title of the webpage.
• Inlcude your keyword in the address if the webpage.
• Use your keyword in <h1> tags at the top of the webpage.
• Include your keyword 3 — 5 times throughout the body of the webpage (for approx. 450 words of text. One keyword occurance per every 100 -250 words is a good ratio.)
• Use <h2> tags on one occurance of the keyword within the body. Bolding is also said to have a positive impact.
• To a lesser extent, including your keyword in the meta tags of the page also helps.

To Summarize

When using SEO, optimization for keywords is essential. Keyword research is ALWAYS the first thing you do when launching an internet marketing campaign. This cannot be stressed enough (if you don’t know why, read my post Keywords are King.) I’ve already written a highly detailed introduction to keyword research for easy online money, which I definitely recommend you read if you don’t fully understand the principals of informed keyword selection.

Once you have your keywords, the next step is build a page on your website for each one, and to target them according to the guidelines I layed out above. This is every bit as crucial as the keywords themselves — a brand new site that is effectively targeting keywords can and will outrank established pages of much higher authority.

I haven’t even begun to cover everything I want to, and this post is already quite lengthy, so I’m going to cut it off here and break this post into two parts. The second part will include: keyword cannibalization, backlinking, Google bombing, and more. Stay tuned! (Or subscribe to Quick Money Making NOW! by email to have new updates delivered straight to your inbox.)

SEO Optimization Essentials Part 2 — Coming Soon!

Tagged as: Earn Money Blogging, Internet network marketing, Keywords, Niche marketing, Ranking, SEO, Traffic, Website Promotion

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