In this article, we’re actually going to begin the optimization of our web page. This is a systematic, step by step approach, so you should be able to take this approach and apply it to any web site at all and not just the one we’re doing in this example.

The first thing you need to do is select a page title for your site. The title should ONLY include your keyword phrase that you want optimized. So, if we’re putting together a web site for “weight loss spells” that’s going to be our title, PERIOD. Not “Great Weight Loss Spells” or “Amazing Weight Loss Spells” but just “Weight Loss Spells.” If we want to call it “Great Weight Loss Spells” then we have to go back and start the process all over again, starting with Wordtracker, finding the number of searches and then going to Google and finding the number of competing sites, as well as what the top sites are. Every keyword MUST be optimized separately. Sounds like a lot of work? Nobody said SEO was easy.

Now, having said that, if you were to do something like this for the title…

“Weight Loss Spells – Safe Weight Loss”

That would be acceptable. Not perfect, but acceptable. You won’t get as much weight from Google if you just used “Weight Loss Spells” but because the main keyword phrase is in the title, you will get some weight for it. In other words the fewer the words the better.

The next thing we want to do is create the heading for our page. This is going to be the first thing they see and unless it is a graphic header, you want the header of your page to be in a h1 tag. Leaving this out can be hazardous to your health. In the h1 tag is going to be the actual heading for your page, which should be “Weight Loss Spells” and that’s it, unless of course you want to go with the alternate title that we mentioned above.

Because of the way that Google reads web pages when they send their Googlebots around, you want your h1 tag to be as far to the left of the page as possible. Why? Because Googlebots read from left to right. Having the h1 tag too far right will hurt your SE rankings.

In our next article, we’ll continue with sub header tags like the h2 tag. We’ll also show you how to make Google read your keywords first. Like I said, this is some pretty complex stuff and there’s a lot to go over. That’s why we’re breaking this tutorial up into sections. Otherwise you would definitely suffer from information overload.

Subpages are not ranked as high as main pages by the search engines. A main page will always get preferential treatment over a subpage. So, since the number 2 page in the Google listings for this keyword is a subpage, we have a very good chance of knocking it out of the number 2 spot if we target our own main page with the keyword “weight loss spells.”

If you go to that page and take a look at its page rank, you’ll see that it only has a page rank of 2. This is not very high at all and yet it’s still the number 2 ranked page for this keyword.

This is going to be a piece of cake.

Oh, in case you don’t understand page rank, let me give you a quick and dirty explanation. Page rank is the way Google gives a value to a web site. The higher the page rank, the more popular. So, a page rank of 6 is better than a page rank of 2. The way this page rank is determined is by the number of links on other sites that point to your site.

So why is this a piece of cake? Simple. A page rank of 2 is nothing. We should be able to knock off a page rank of 2 in no time flat, thus bringing us up to at least the second position on Google.

Okay, let’s go back to the number 2 site on Google and look up the keywords that this site uses. Easy to do. Just go to the top of your browser and click on “view” and then “source.” If you look through the source, you should see 2 lines that looks like this.

There is something very interesting about this site and how it is optimized.

It’s not.

Look closely. The title of the site does have the keyword “weight loss spells” in it. But if you look at the keywords line, you’ll see that nowhere in that line do they have “weight loss spells.” This is a major boo-boo and yet they still managed to land at the number 2 position at Google for this keyword. All we have to do is include the keyword “weight loss spells” in our keyword line for our site and we’ve already got an advantage over them.

Another thing you will notice is their header tags. There are none. A header tag is a piece of HTML that starts either h1, h2, etc. This site has only one h1 header tags on the page. That’s another plus on our favor. All we have to do is include an H1 tag on our web page and that at least puts us on the same level as them.

For those who don’t know what header tags are, they’re HTML tags that tell a person’s browser to print this as a heading, meaning it will be larger in type than the rest of the print under it.

For example:

This Is A Heading Of A Page

And this is the smaller print that goes under it.

So as you can see, we have quite a few things we can do already to push our site above this site in the search engines.

Let’s take a look to see if the keyword “weight loss spells” is bolded anywhere on the page. The only place it’s bolded is in the h1 tag itself. Nowhere else on the page does this keyword appear at all.

That is totally mind boggling that this site is number 2 at Google under this keyword and yet on their page the keyword itself is only listed one time.

And, did you happen to take a look at how horrible this page is as far as design? How many people do you think would go to a site like this and actually stay there long? One can only imagine how bad the sites are that are under this site. If we were to put up a quality site, fully optimized for this keyword, there is no reason and just no way we can’t reach the number 2 position, minimum.

Based on all the things we’ve learned about this site for this keyword, based on the way that Google ranks pages, we should easily be able to outrank this site, which only has a page rank of 2.

Now, what we just did with this web site, we should do for the top 5 web sites on the search page of Google. If all the top sites turn out to be this poorly constructed and have low page ranks, then we should have no trouble knocking them all down.

It happens to everyone and some marketers can roll with the changes with ease, while others struggle to keep up. If you look to the future, it can help you predict how things might change so you can head off the SEO lag time most marketers will experience and stay one step ahead of the competition.

The biggest change you’re going to notice is that things are evolving into real time. Keywords, indexing – it’s going to be updated quicker than in the past, so you won’t be able to rest on your laurels enjoying a top spot in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and likewise, you’ll have ample opportunity to move up in the ranks if you pay attention closely.

In 2010, you’re going to see Google working on ways to combine real time results (which basically means the last one to mention something, if it’s indexed, will be shown) with relevancy, which was Google’s biggest beef with websites that were using keywords to trick searchers in the first place!

Real time search doesn’t replace regular SEO page results, though. It’s integrated into the SERPs so that you have the option of choosing the latest results or the pages. So you’ll be able to capitalize on both options as a marketer.

All of the regular SEO tactics will stay the same. You’ll want to post frequently on your website or blog. You’ll want to use relevant keyword phrases without stuffing them into it so that it reads awkwardly.

Backlinks from the right kind of relevant sites will be to your benefit, while so-called bad neighborhoods will still damage your reputation with Google. It’s expected that businesses – both online and offline – will be increasing their spending to SEO experts and investing in SEO tools to help them either boost or maintain their position in the search engines.

You can be a self-taught SEO expert just by educating yourself about what tactics are allowed (and which are frowned upon) and tracking and tweaking your methods so get the best traffic results.

• Content is the key. Lots of it, with constant up dates to it, and it should be well written and informative not just a sales pitch.

• The more pages you can create the better. Upwards of 100 pages will highlight your site as an important one. Sites with only a few pages rarely appear on the first page of search engine results.

• As the site ages its importance will increase. Those who got in early generally outperform the later sites. Google also have an ageing process for links. As these links approach six months old they become of more importance.

• Reciprocal links once gone through the ageing process are still being counted, even with Google’s updated algorithm.

• Article writing and publishing will produce huge numbers of backlinks. You should be looking to produce upwards of 30 articles and aim for around 250.

• Attaching a weblog to your site which is updated daily will increase the rate at which the search engines visit your site and at the same time adds valuable content and links.

• Page Rank has still some importance in determining your position in the rankings because it is based on the links and the content of your site. However the page rank as given by the Google Toolbar is not necessarily accurate. A more accurate page rank can be gauged from using the detail supplied by the Google Sitemap statistics. Consequently generate a sitemap and submit it to Google.

The most important piece of advice is to design your site for the visitor and not the search engines. Have as much information within the content as possible and keep the graphics to a minimum.

Brad Cullen’s first chapter of his free giveaway book (it’s nice to be so rich that you can just give stuff away) was called “Optimize the Wrong Keywords and You’ll Most Likely Never See Results.” No truer words were ever spoken. And yet, so many people never get this. They want to throw up a site with the keywords “Home Business” and expect to see results. They’d have a better chance of getting a date with a super model.

Brad explains how you have to really get into the basement of a niche. Well, those weren’t his words, but that’s really what he meant. Today we call them long tail keywords. These are the keywords that are down at the end of the search chain. Now, a lot of people might immediately think, “How can that do me any good? If few people search using these keywords, how do I get traffic?” Well, we’ll get to that shortly. The point is, you have absolutely no chance going against the big boys of “Home Business” or “Weight Loss” or any of the other, what I call, “main keywords.” The reason is because everybody and their grandmother is optimizing on those keywords. So to have a prayer with SEO, you have to go the other route.

Now, that isn’t to say that someday you’re not going to incorporate these main keywords into your SEO. You will, but you have to get in through the back door first. Then you can start pulling in traffic from some of the major keywords.

So let’s say you’re in the niche of “weight loss”, which is a very big one today. The first thing you need to do is go to a keyword suggestion tool (I use Wordtracker) and find out what some of the long tail keywords are that maybe don’t have as much competition.
Here is the URL that you need to go to in order to look these keywords up.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Okay, so let’s go there and look up “weight loss”

As you can see, the weight loss main keyword has over 12,000 searches a month as of this printing. That’s a lot of searches. But if you go to the Google search engine and look to see how many sites come up under the keyword “weight loss” you will find that it is over 45 million sites. Think you have a shot in Hades of putting a dent in this market?

Okay, let’s run down our keyword list to something that doesn’t quite have as much competition.

Let’s look at “weight loss spells” Hey, don’t laugh. It was searched for about 63 times last month.

If you look at the number of sites that are optimized for that keyword, it’s only about 22,ooo.

Now THAT is a much more manageable number.

See where we’re going with this?

Good. Next article we’ll pick it up from here.

In practice, this is a whole other ballgame. Why? Because the search engines, which years ago used to be predictable, continuously change the rules on us and make life just plain difficult. For example, when FFA pages first came out and people would post their links to these FFA pages, the search engines would include these pages in their listings and give you credit for having your link on these pages. But then, as the search engines began to realize that nobody actually went to these pages, they stopped including them in their listings. Now, all those links that people had out there turned out to be worthless. People’s search engine rankings for their sites began to plummet overnight. Most people had no explanation for it. But the ones who took the time to find out, either through insider information or just trial and error, realized that posting to FFA sites wouldn’t help your SE ranking and only hurt it. So they started putting out reports on this and made money through those reports.

The point is, SEO is constantly changing because the rules are always changing. However, having said that, there are some strategies which are basic and will never change. If you master these strategies and use them all the time, you have a decent chance of working your way up the search engines. Some techniques work better than others and there are some shortcuts that we can use today to help get us up the search engines a little quicker. Will those shortcuts work tomorrow? Nobody really knows. But for the purposes of what works today, we’re going to include those shortcuts into the following articles.

Just a disclaimer before we actually get into the ABCs of SEO. Because of the volatile nature of search engines, I make no guarantees that the methods you are about to read are going to land you on page one. For one thing, it is a lot harder to land on the first page of the search engines when you’re competing with 10 million other sites. It’s a lot easier if you only have a few thousand sites to deal with. That is one of the things that you’re going to learn throughout this series, how to pick a niche where you will have the best chance of getting a top spot on the search engines.

One other thing you need to be aware of. Each SE has its own criteria, so landing on page one of a particular search engine doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to land on page one on ALL the search engines. That’s why you want to concentrate on the main search engines and just a few of them. Over time, the rest will come.

SEO is quite a war. Many today are winning the war because of some of these methods.

So sit back and get yourself prepared for one very intense tutorial on SEO.