Advanced SEO

Many, many people are still confused about search engine optimization. They think it's a really difficult thing to learn and requires a ton of expertise. Well, if you're planning to set up an SEO service then yes, you will need a ton of expertise, but for the average webmaster such knowledge is a little extreme.

So I'd like to talk about the best way to get your web pages on the first page of all the major search engines using the techniques that have worked for thousands of webmasters for years.

To start with, you don't optimize websites, you optimize web pages. Each and every page on your website will need to be optimized separately, especially if they target different keywords.

You need to target the keywords that relate to your target audience, and you need to make the keywords as specific as possible. For example, simply targeting the keyword 'gardening' isn't good enough. You need to hit much more targeted keywords or, as they really are, phrases. For example:

• Organic Gardening
• Vegetable Gardening
• Herb Gardening
• Container Gardening

Then you can target even smaller niche keywords to get yourself a really specific phrase that relates to just a few hundred searches per month. For example:

• Organic Vegetable Gardening
• Organic Indoor Gardening
• Organic Herb Gardening
• Organic Container Gardening

... and so on.

This means your content is highly targeted, and isn't just hitting a broad phrase which contains millions of search engine results with websites that have been established for years.

To find my keywords, I use Wordtracker and The Dowser. You can quickly find your highly targeted keywords and phrases which have very little competition, and you'll find keywords you never even thought of.

As well as targeting the right phrases, there are a number of on-page optimization techniques you can do to give yourself a well-optimized, search-engine-friendly web page.

You need to include your main keyword or phrase in the H1 and H2 tags of your web page, and you need to ideally have a density of 1%-3% for your main keyword or phrase within your content. And your keyword or phrase should ideally be present in the first and last paragraph of your content, and if you're getting serious then you can include your keyword or phrase after the copyright notice on your web page.

Now, to get great on-page SEO I use XSitePro's built-in SEO module, and then to tweak each page to beat the number 1 ranking site for my keyword or phrase I use Internet Business Promoter. Let me tell you, this software is amazing and makes advanced SEO incredibly easy. And the great thing is, you never have to worry about how the SE algorithms change because IBP changes with them... instantly!

But of course, there is only so much on-page optimization you can do. The real factor in getting ranked well in the search engines is using good off-page optimization.

What does this mean? Well, it's all about the number of links you get pointing to your website. You need to get as many incoming links as you can using your main keyword or phrase as the anchor text (the text that is displayed in the link), but you need to do this without using link farms or FFA pages as your site could be penalized.

Even reciprocal linking, whereby you exchange links with other websites, is no longer as effective as it was. It's certainly not a bad thing to do, and you should definitely be doing it, but one-way links coming into your website are better... for the moment.

How do you get these one-way links? By writing articles! You can write articles related to your niche and submit them to article directories. Each article you write will contain an 'about the author' box in which you can put a link to your website and include the optimized anchor text. You then stand a good chance of your article being picked up
by various webmasters who will reprint it on their website... which will result in a one-way incoming link to your website.

But submitting your articles can take forever to do. There are so many websites to submit them to, it takes hours just to send your article to a dozen sites... unless you use Article Post Robot.

APR is superb software, which fully automates your article submission tasks. Simply plug in your article, click Post... and go down the pub. When you get back, your article will have been submitted to nearly 200 article directories.

So, there's the secret: well-chosen keywords, well-optimized pages and good quality incoming links. That wasn't so hard, was it? :-)