Learn SEO! From Your SEO Mentor

So you want to Learn SEO! There are many areas on the World Wide Web where you can learn what SEO is, but beware you need to find the right information. My name is Garrett Pierson and I am Your SEO Mentor. I have been doing Search Engine Optimization for three years now and have had much success in my SEO campaigns for myself and for my clients. I am here to help those that want to Learn SEO and want some basic and even advanced techniques to use on your sites to get top rankings in the Search Engines. Stay tuned for some great content about Search Engine Optimization. I will be posting some fun and interesting information about SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website through an extensive mixture of tasks that help improve a website's presence on the search engines. So this brings up the question, "What is a Search Engine?" This question can easily be answered by asking you to get on the internet and visiting Google.com, Yahoo.com, or MSN.com. These are the most popular and Major Search Engines. A search engine is an extensive database that uses algorithms (the way information is collected) to pull information quickly and efficiently, making information easily available. A person using a search engine will specify criteria (keywords/phrases) about something they are interested in for example "Real Estate". When a person enters their search criteria into the search engine they hope to find information that is most relevant to the keywords entered. This is the main goal of a search engine, to give its users totally relevant results of their search criteria. Let Your SEO Mentor Help you learn SEO and Social Marketing at YourSEOMentor.com

Now it is important to know how search engines work to understand the question "What is SEO?" Search Engines use robots or spiders, which are software that gather information and bring it back to be analyzed at the main Search Engine Index or in simple terms the main central database that stores all the information. This process in which the search engine spiders gather this information is called "Crawling", or "Spidering". Here is the best way we could think of explaining this process. Imagine a spider family that needs to gather Food (in the case of the WWW think of food as the HTML text on your website) to bring back to the main spider-web (Search Engine Index "Database"). The spider uses a highway (HTML Links on Websites) to gather food faster and more efficiently. Once the spider has gathered food, it then takes it back to the spider-web (Search Engine Index "Database"). Now the information is sorted out, and the Search Engine uses this information to help the user find what he or she is looking for. So when someone searches "Real Estate" the Search Engine will provide results that are most relevant from its database. Note: Search Engines are constantly changing the way their spiders collect information and how it is stored in their Index, this is why it is so important to stay up-to-date on changes and techniques.

Keep in mind that on the search engines there are sponsored links that are Paid Search results that usually are placed on the top, side, and bottom of the natural search results. This is a whole other subject called Paid Per Click (PPC) so keep in mind that SEO deals with natural rankings and PPC deals with paid rankings.

Now that you know what Search Engines are and how they work, you can now better understand what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is and how it can help you. Here is another good example using the spider analogy. Think of a person performing SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) to a website as the spider feeder. This professional will optimize the way that the spider collects food. In terms of a website the professional will optimize the website so that the Search Engine spiders will easily be able to gather the required and relevant information. Stay tuned to find out more of what SEO Professionals do to optimize their websites.

Keyword/Phrase Research - this step is key in the SEO process and should be first above any other step. First, you need to find the keywords/phrases that you think a person would search for to find your website. Really you are researching keywords that are targeted and relevant to your market. Next you will research the traffic volume or popularity of the keywords/phrases, this is essential because it would be pointless to optimize your website for a keyword or phrase that gets zero (0) searches. Next you will research the Competition of the keywords or keyphrases that you have chosen. If a keyword/phrase is too competitive you have to analyze whether or not it is worth optimizing. The reason for this is simple, if you have chosen the keyword "Real Estate" then you have a huge task ahead of you. We are not saying that you can't get ranked on the first page of the major search engines for this keyword but you have to decide if it is worth the time and effort. Choose keywords/phrases that are unique and yet are attainable.

Url/Domain Name Optimization - Once you have found your main keyword you are going to focus on the next step, which is to decide what your Domain name is going to be. You might ask, "What is a Domain Name?" A Domain Name is the name that a person would type into a web-browser to visit your website e.g. http://www.yourdomainnamehere.com/. To optimize your Domain Name you will want to find something that is short, targeted to your market, explains your site, and uses the main keyword you have chosen through your Keyword Research. So for example if your keyword was "Real Estate" then you would want to use those keywords in your domain name. Some may argue that using the keywords in your domain name is to general and doesn't brand your company. This is for you to decide, but it is proven at least for now that the Search Engines use the domain name text in their algorithms of how they see your site's relevancy to the search criteria. Note: The domain name you choose needs to be available to purchase.

On-Page Optimization - another important step of optimizing your website is optimizing the web pages that the user and the spiders see. Now this is the trickiest part of SEO because you want to optimize your site for the Search Engine Spiders but you also want to optimize your site for your users/visitors. The best rule of thumb is to lean toward optimizing your site for the users first because more and more the search engines are looking at your site as if a human was, this is called Latent Semantic Indexing, optimize as natural as possible. So on-page optimization uses the following techniques:

• Content Optimization
• Keyword Placement (Frequency, Density, Proximity, etc.)
• Title Tag Optimization
• Meta Tag Optimization
• Spider/Robot Tag Optimization
• Image Alt Optimization
• Internal Link Structure
• 301 Redirects
• Robot.txt Creation
• Broken Links & Page Optimization
• Site Mapping
• Avoiding Specific Design Optimization Issues (Graphic, Flash, Dynamic, Frameset, and Javascript only Sites)

Off-Page Optimization - As important as any of the other steps of SEO, Off-page optimization is key to your success. Think of it this way the search engines want to see how popular your website is to the online world. This strategy of off-page optimization is where you optimize your website off the pages of your site. Link Building is most important to the off-page optimization process. Link Building is where you get a link back to your website on someone else's site. The important step is to have your keyword within the anchor text of the link not just simply putting http://www.mydomainname.com/ as the link text. Getting links from Authority Sites (high traffic and highly ranked sites) is also very important again letting the search engines know that your site is popular. Most importantly with link building is getting links from sites that are relevant to your website and your keywords/phrases, if you for example get 100 links from Health Care websites and your Keyword is targeted toward "Real Estate" then the search engines won't think you are really that popular or relevant to the criteria of "Real Estate". Note: Getting links from irrelevant sites is not bad just not going to optimize your off-page process. Here are some of the important items of off-page optimization:

• Link Building (One Way and Reciprocal Links)
• Link Baiting (Luring others to want to link to your website)
• Article Submissions (Keyword rich content with links back to your website submitted to Article Directories)
• Press Release Submission (Optimized content with keywords & links, and also a great Link Baiting opportunity)
• Directory Submissions
• Search Engine Submission (Submitting your website to the search engines saying, "Spiders come look at my site, I have food for you.")
• Sitemap Submissions

One important skill in SEO is measuring the results of applying some of the basic SEO techniques that we have mentioned above. To be a successful Search Engine Optimization professional you must Test, Test, and Test again. Patience is another quality that someone doing SEO must possess. You need to realize that you will not see results in one (1) or two (2) days actually you must be prepared to begin waiting and it could take time to see results maybe for two (2) to even (6) months. A quick way to see if you website is even seen (indexed) by the search engines is by typing site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com into the search engine, if your site is indexed in the search engine you will see results in the query if not you will see "Your search - site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com - did not match any documents". The manual way to monitor your rankings is simply typing in your keyword/phrase you are trying to rank for and search through the search engine results until you find your website. There are tools that you can use to monitor your rankings. Web analytics measures your online activity such as how much traffic your website is receiving, from where, and also measuring conversion. The most famous and may we add free Web analytic software is Google Analytics. This free web analytics tool is very robust giving you the geographic, trends, exit pages, and referrers of where your traffic is coming from and leaving from.

So "What is SEO?" well we have given you some of the very basics above in this article but we realize that there is much much more to SEO than just these things and you must keep up on all the changes and updates of the Search Engines. This is why we are opening up a SEO Membership Site that we teach our users Step by Step with Video Tutorial the basics and advanced aspects of SEO.

Find out more at LearnSEOLive.com