Search Engine Optimization Training for Beginners

If you're not sure what SEO is then this search engine optimization training will get you started!

I'm about to show you why your title, description and keywords are so important and then how to get search engines to notice your website.

By the end of this article you'll be able to boost your organic search engine traffic.

The Importance of Your Title and Description

First of all, SEO stands for search engine optimization. That just means that you're modifying your pages so that search engines will recognize them and people will find them in the search results. It's all about organic traffic coming from the search engines. But what do you see in search engine results when you search for something? You see the title of a page and then a short description!

And wouldn't you know it, I've actually seen some really high class sites that still have "home" or "index" as the title of their page... who's going to click that? Most people look at the highlighted title first and then they will read the description to see if they want to click it. So you really need to make sure you have a description and tempting title for every single one of your pages because the search engines are going to display it in bold, blue, underlined text right up top. Make it short, straight to the point and too tempting not to click, but not deceitful! Don't disappoint your readers by having a hyped up title and then your page doesn't really relate to the title at all.

And once you hook someone in with an attractive title then you need to compliment it with a good description. You can add this into the metadata of your page (on here it's the summary you type in on the right) but these days a lot of search engines don't use it. Sure, if someone types your URL in the search box, it'll show your standard description that it pulls from the metadata, but if they use a normal keyword then it usually won't. What it will normally do is find a good sentence from your body text that contains that keyword and will put that as the description. That way it shows the reader the keyword they're looking for in the context that you're using it on your page.

So the keywords you have on your page are pretty important; they're what is going to bring people to your page and you'll learn that from all search engine optimization training. Sure, you can add keywords to your metadata too but that's not as important these days since keywords can be easily drawn from your body text. So you need to be sure that you're drawing in the right traffic by using the right keywords. Like if you kept saying dog over and over again on a page but yet the page isn't really about dogs at all, then you might have some problems.

So you want to raise what's called the keyword density for specific keywords you want to target. You need to find phrases that directly relate to the content of your page, get a good amount of traffic each month and that a lot of people aren't already targeting. Once you find a keyword that meets those three requirements then you need to pop it naturally into your title, your description and your keywords, if you're going to punch in your metadata. And then you want to have it in the first or second sentence on your page, then once every 30 to 50 words and then right at the end of your page.

You can also name some of the picture files as your keyword and make sure that it's in bold at some point on your page. When you enter something as bold text, underlined text, make it italic, make it heading text instead of just body text then search engines see it as important keywords on your page. Otherwise why would you be drawing so much attention to it, right? So raise the density of your target keyword on your page, using these steps, and search engines will say, "Oh, wow! This page much be all about *your keyword*!"

Now you need to get search engines to start doing what is called "crawling" your pages. Which is just where their bots scan the information on your page and then index your page by adding it to their search engine results. You can simply go to Google and add your page to the list of sites to be crawled, but that will take a while. Sure, they will get to you eventually but I think you want to be in the search results as fast as possible!

So how are you going to do that? Well, first you could add Google Analytics to your page so that Google knows your page is out there and you can track a lot of different aspects about your traffic. But you can also get the attention of search engines by having other sites link to you. If there is a website out there that is already in Google's index and is frequently updated then they'll notice a link to your site on their page and then add you into their index automatically.

So your best bet would be to get some links pointing to you from sites with a high page rank that people go to all the time to add new content. And if you go to Alexa and look at the top sites, you've got Google, Facebook and Youtube as the top three. All highly trafficked places which would be great to add your link to. You can add your link to your Google profile or on Google bookmarks in a public list, post it to pretty much anywhere on Facebook that is publically viewable and then post a video on YouTube with it in the description of the video. Be sure to use your target keyword as the anchor text any time you can; which is the text that is bold, blue and underlined. And another great site that seems to help you get indexed fast is Identi.ca. So use all of them and search around for a few other sites that you know are popular and updated often.

This simple search engine optimization training has been proven to get your pages indexed quickly and drawing in the kind of traffic you actually want. So choose a good title, write a short description, choose a good keyword and make sure your page is keyword dense and then promote your page a little so that the search engines notice it. Now you don't have to wait months to see your page show up in the search engine results.