Tips to Improve your SEO Skills

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the means of being able to improve your website so that search engines will like you better, and get your pages well indexed in their search engine. Since I starting marketing online a few years ago I was pretty unskilled in this area, but over time I started to get the picture of what search engines like to see in a site. After reading some interesting eBooks from other people (yes you can learn a lot from other people who have much more experience in SEO). So if you had to learn the basics to get you started to become an SEO expert (although it may take awhile for you to do so), here are some basic, yet very important SEO tactics you and every serious webmaster should know about.

1. Content - The more unique your content is, the better, search engines (especially Google) wants to see content that is unique, and not just copied from article housing sites, and the like.

2. Less HTML and more text - Basically, keep things as simple as possible, I found that sites that look all fancy, tend to do no better than very basic sites that just have the SEO foundation down. Try to keep your HTML tags as little as possible and keep your content (I.E. text images) as your key focus in a site. Try to keep your base template as simple as you can. A lot of people can get turned off going to a site that has a bunch of links, tables and tables of small areas of content, it just confuses the web surfer and they will most likely leave.

3. Use of the Header Tags - This is something not very many people consider or even think about, but the use of Header tags, specifically the <H1></H1> tag is very important and should be on every page of your site, to indicate what the main focus of that page is about, so it gives the search engines a better understanding of what your page on your site is about. Although there is <H2></H2> tags and h3, h4, etc.., they are not nearly as important as the <H1> tag. I do recommend using h2 tags, but they are not necessary.

4. Link structure - The link structure of your site is very important, especially if you are trying to get all the pages of your site well indexed in the SEs. Try to keep your link structure the same nearly across every page of your site, especially the homepage (index.htm usually) of your site.

5. Incoming links to your site (AKA backlinks) - This is probably one of the most important aspects of getting a highly ranked website on search engines, and takes a lot of work as well. A backlink is a link on a site (other than yours) that points to your site. Search engine robots crawl the internet through links, and that is how your site gets indexed in the first place! The more incoming links you have to your site, the better ranking you will get. Also, not every link is considered equal. Links from similar sites are important, also the rank of the site that points to yours is important as well.

6. Title Tags - Title Tags, which are simple the <title></title> tag at the top of the html file that indicates the title of the page, this is very important because that is the link you see when you do a search engine search. And obviously this is important for ranking pages high.

7. Learn from others - I will finish this article up with you can learn a lot from watching what other people do, read indepth eBooks, that is where I have personally learned most of my knowledge of SEO. I do not consider myself an expert in this field, but gurus like Brad Collen (you can check out his famous SEO ebook here), and John Reese have been pretty much been the leader in SEO in the internet marketing world.

Search Engine Optimization is extremely important to know and understand if your goal is to bring in massive amounts of free search engine traffic to your site.