(SEO) - Search engine optimization Tutorial

SEO is the process of improving the quality and volume of traffic to web sites from search engines. Some of the most important determining factors in ranking a site in search results are the site content,site age,site links,word counts, key words, link count, updates, errors, page load speeds, website navigation, domain name and title tag.

Assuming two sites have similar pages and content the site with unique content would rank better. If there are a 1000 websites focused on the same subject, many will contain the same information. Finding a unique perspective to share with visitors will give you a boost in rankings. Your content should be accurate, factual, complete and useful to visitors.

Do not expect to put up a site today and have a number one search ranking tomorrow. At one time years ago that was possible. No more, search engines visit sites regularly and track page updates, site page additions, inbound links, and hundreds of other factors over time. Sites that are regularly maintained rank better in most cases then sites that never grow or are not updated.

Both on site links and inbound links from other sites, count in ranking a site. The links on your site should point to all of your pages. Do not create dead end links, links that point to a page that links to no other pages anywhere. Your page links should be easy to navigate by users. You should only link to other sites that are related to your content. Inbound links from sites should also be content related when possible.

The word count in your page meta tags, title and page content both need to be high enough to accurately describe your site and inform visitors. You can see the proper word count for the title and description by doing any search on Google. The space available on the results page for titles and descriptions is obvious. The page title results are about 8 to 10 words. The site descriptions are 2 sentences long, about 20 to 25 words. Page content will vary depending on the type of page you are making. Do not just paste keywords all over a page to boost word counts. Information pages should be at least the length of a short newspaper article and have at least 250 to 500 words. On pages that do not require a lot of information content , like a picture gallery,contact page or signup form, use your page titles and description tags to describe the page as accurately as possible. Place a headline on the page with a detailed description.

Your domain: Keywords or name ?
Assuming two sites have similar keywords and page content. budget-shoes.com will generally get ranked higher than my-store-name.com, when internet users are searching for shoes. You may want to brand your company name with your domain, in that case keywords are not important in your domain. The idea of name branding is being so popular that people will search for your name. If name branding is your goal, you should plan on an advertising budget as well as using all the free means necessary to get your name widely seen in public. At MyTrafficPro our focus is on helping users starting their own work at home business for the first time. Which in most cases means you have a limited budget. So we recommend you use keywords in your domain name. This will help you get more targeted visitors searching for the product you offer.

A great help finding an optimized domain name is a free keyword suggestion tool.
Find the keywords you need to succeed online here
Most popular simple domains now are probably already registered. Using a hyphen in your domain name can help you get past the problem of a limited number of great names being available. An example would be bestbuy.com becomes best-buy.com, 2 completely different domains. Free Sub domains are offered by hosting providers. And you are not required to pay to register your name. A sub domain name looks like this:
bargain-shoes.mywebhost.com, mywebhost is your hosting providers domain.

Your page title is very important and weighs heavily with the major search engines, so spend some time thinking about it.
Here is what you should consider when naming your site and pages:
It should be accurate, keyword-rich, and about 8 - 10 words. Do not include what are called stop words. They are filtered out prior to processing ranks by search engines. There is no definite list of stop words. They are words unimportant to the content used in natural language. To a search engine the word [ girl ] and the words [ the girl ] [a girl] and [that girl] are the same. Basically stop words are small 1 to 4 letter words that are not that important to the content or subject matter. Examples: (and, the, a, if, but, or, etc.) Remember that every page you create should have a unique title. Know that the title is the first thing the searcher will see in the search results. Getting that click depends on a well structured title. Once a page is online and indexed by search engines,
Never change your title! If you need a new title for your content make a new page. Changing your title could ruin your search engine rank for a long time. One exception would be if you accidentally create 2 pages with identical titles. The options here are to delete one page and all links to it. Or change the title on one of the duplicate titled pages.

Headline tags should not be used to just size text on a web page. Headline tags should be used to show the importance of the content. They should be used like printed newspapers use headlines to get the readers attention. If you use a headline tag, search engines treat the text in this tag as more important than the content on the rest of the page.

Keyword density Is the ratio of relevant or optimized words to the word count of your pages. Sprinkle keywords throughout your page content. Do not over do keyword density, keep it at about 8 to 10 percent for each page on your site. Keep the use of keywords natural and logical, do not just paste them all over your page, that would be seen as keyword spamming by search engines.
Use a keywords meta tag even though search engines now put very little value on this tag or completely ignore it. New search engines are always popping up and search algorithms regularly change. And with all the search sites out there some may still use the tag in some way. There is no harm in using the keywords meta tag and there is a possibility that it could give you an advantage over the competition one day.

Testing SEO techniques
Although Google keeps their search algorithms top secret they are more then willing to share search rank data with webmasters to help improve they site pages. Google Webmaster Tools provide important information about your pages and help you make your site more Google friendly.
Google Webmaster Tools

We continually test new SEO techniques at FunwithyourPC. We are currently testing the continued use of the keywords meta tag on this site. Some pages have the tag in place and some pages do not. When we analyze the traffic results we will be posting an article with our recommendations for continued use of the keyword meta tag. Testing is really the best way to get SEO web design insight and understand the top secret search engine algorithms.

Spelling - simple spelling can make or break a web page. Search engines give a lower rank to pages with misspelled words. It is an old technique used by some to gain traffic from typos. And example would be to deliberately misspell Coca Cola, to benefit from spelling errors while people are searching the internet.