KhalidsLife.com

I split my Search Engine Optimisation program into three main areas; On Site SEO, Off Site SEO and Backlink  Building.

This is the first of three posts about SEO and my aim is to help you understand the basics that often go unnoticed. Why take my advice? Well it’s free and to prove it works here are two examples of my recent achievements…

Kortaz.com ranked 1st for “Web Proxy” 

TattooLettering.net ranked 2nd for “Tattoo Lettering” in one month 

I’m not an expert and I don’t have all the answers, but these tips do help me so they will help you. So, what’s my advice? Well let’s begin with the meta tags…

<Title> Tag – Keep this your targeted keyword. If you are wanting to rank well for “Diet Plans” then your title should be exactly that, nothing more. Don’t confuse search engines with “Free and Simple Diet Plans and Weight Loss Assistance” if that’s not what you’re targeting. For my blog, my title is “Internet Entrepreneur Khalid Al-Khames”, so people know who the blog belongs to.

<Keywords> - Keep this to a maximum of 10 keywords, let’s not try to target anymore than that. I’ve never ranked a site 1st for more than 3 keywords, so 10 is out of reach, but keep a few extra in for choice. Use a keyword search tool to find other popular keyword terms

<Description> - Short and sweet, keyword inclusive, for example “Diet Plans and Diet Information by DietPlansUK.com”
Secondly, the content…

Articles – Your site should have at least 4 pages with 500 word articles that are keyword inclusive, for example “Simple Diet Plans”, “Vegetarian Diet Plans”, “Bad Diet Plans” etc etc (notice how they all have your keyword “Diet Plans” in them). Article headers should use <h1> tags too!

Links – Your internal links should be keyword inclusive and use the description tag too. For example, “Simple Diet Plans” should be “Simple-Diet-Plans.htm” and not “sdp1.htm”. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, use SEO friendly links by editing the hyperlinking in your control panel.

Sitemap – Get yourself a free sitemap, just google it.

Robots – Ensure your site has a Robots.txt file too

Images – Ensure your images have SEO filenames and use the alt description tag too. For example “Diet-Planner.jpg” description “Diet Planner”.

Social Bookmarks – Sharing our findings is all the rage these days, with sites like Digg, Netscape, Stumble Upon and Technorati having millions of users. Although most of these sites use the “No Follow” tag, it is still worthwhile getting backlinks from these sites. Add a Social Bookmark button(s) to your site because if you get, even 1, submission by a user each day, that’s 31 new links every month.

I hope this helps, good luck!

Khalid.