What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of researching and molding a website’s content and content tags to reach the desired audience that is searching for specific products, topics, or services using Internet search engines. Sites often look pleasing to the human eye but are unreadable to search engine spiders. I think of a search spider as if they were a 1st grader wondering through my site. Different pages of the site have to be clearly marked with descriptive texts so that the spider knows what it is looking at. No links can be completely buried or they will never be found. A simplified sitemap with links to all the important areas of your site is a must. Link to the sitemap from every page of your site so the spider never gets completely lost.

Using Common Sense SEO Practices
A common sense approach to site building is often the best SEO tactic. When you are linking to internal pages or article on your own site think twice about the words that you use for the link titles. The relevancy of any page in Google is heavily weighted to the keywords used in the link titles on external sites and pages that link to it. If you are linking to certain pages/areas of your site on all your pages, make sure that you use descriptive link titles. For example, many people link to “Contact” on each page of their site. Who searches for just the word “contact”? Using the title “Contact Jim Brown” for the link will boost the page and overall site relevance for “Jim Brown”. I see problems like this all the time on E-commerce sites where the designers have a link to “Products” instead of “Laptop Products” or “Cell Phone Products”. Do they think people just go to Google and type in “products” and hit enter?

A Flexible CMS (Content Management System)
Using a CMS (Content Management System) is necessary unless you want to constantly edit 100s of pages each time you discover something that has a positive effect on your ranking. Nearly all open source CMS systems have plugins available that will improve many important aspects of your site’s readability to search spiders. One of the main reasons I like CMS systems are because they allow you to create the URL for the article on the fly, totally based on what title you type in. Google and other search engines give relevancy points if they keyword is also contained in the url.

Experience Counts
To better understand how to get your web site ranking higher in search results, it’s necessary to understand which terms you should focus on ranking for, and the logic used by different search engines to serve their results. There is not substitute for experience and continuous education when trying to decipher Google’s logic for how they determine the order of their search results. You need to locate some trustworthy forums, twitter users, and SEO experts on various social networking sites where you can dig into the latest SEO topics and tactics. No time for SEO? Hire an agency.

Want a website that makes money but don’t know where to start?

If you are a publisher with goals of making a living from websites, there are two basic goals you should start out with, get traffic, and convert that traffic into money. 

Chances are, if you have a good idea for site, it probably will never become huge.  There’s already good ideas in motion on millions of websites.  If your idea makes you nearly soil yourself every time you think about it, you might have a chance.  You can be successful with sites that don’t become hugely popular, you just have to have a lot of them. 

You need to focus on the type of ads that are going to pay you the most money, then construct the site(s) around them so that those high paying web advertisements are relevant to your users.  It doesn’t hurt if you like the topic of your site, but it definitely isn’t necessary.  Do some research, figure out which types of ads are paying the most, and will likely continue to do so.  Read forums, look at revenue program review sites, get involved in some webmaster communities.

Found an Ad Sector you like ? Research the competition!  Check out the first 10 sites listed in google and make notes of the best and worst features of each.  Incorporate their strong points into your design outline, and focus on providing better options in areas that your competition is weak. 

My Tip: Buy a few books on search engine optimization tomorrow.