Now-a-days more and more people turn to the major search engines to find what they are looking for. When was the last time you opened a phone book to find the local Pizza Hut®, or find that handbag that you had to have? It is much easier to jump online, go to Google and type in "Seattle pizza hut" to find the phone number for a delivery order. Businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars on print advertising, TV advertising, and radio advertising each month. Why? When was the last time you were listening to your favorite radio station and changed the channel when the commercials came on? Modern technology lets you fast forward through TV commercials.

Search engine marketing/online marketing will put your business in front of the proper markets and people who want your product or service and are actively searching for it. The biggest benefit to SEM is that it costs a fraction of the cost of traditional forms of marketing and advertising.

Below is a brief break down of Search Engine Optimization: SEO 101

Meta tags:

When was the last time you bought a book? Before you bought the book, did you read the summary on the back of the book to see if you would like the book? Book summaries are a lot like Meta tags. Meta tags tell search engines about your webpage. Each web page within your website should have its own custom Meta tags. Currently, in the search engine optimization world Meta tags do not hold a lot of weight. Having good content, link popularity, and quality links are the focus of SEO. We know now that when a search engine spider indexes your website it will grade you on hundreds of different things, each thing or variable, holds a different amount of weight in the rankings game.

Can you achieve high search engine rankings without Meta tags? Yes. Will having proper Meta tags help you get to the first page of a result listing? Yes. Picture this; you are up against 200,000 other web pages in a keyword market. Your site is compared to the top 10 sites on the result listing and it looks like you might push through. In a case like this, would you rather have a few extra points for having relevant Meta tags, or would you pass on the points? Of course, you would like to do everything that you can in order to achieve high search engine rankings.

Keep in mind that the more relevant your Meta tags are to your page content, the higher your page rank will be. Below are a few helpful hints to help you with writing your Meta tags. To view proper Meta tags go to www.mobilepenguins.com, right click and select View Source. Notice how keyword relevancy is achieved in the title, description, and keyword tags.

Title Tag

* Keep the title tag under one hundred characters. The title tag is the blue link that appears on the results listing, so make sure that it will be appealing to your target market.

* The goal in optimization is to achieve high search engine rankings. When writing your title tag, try to use the main keywords that you are going to target in the page.

Example:

If I am selling knives and one of the product lines that my store carries is cold steel. My website has a product page dedicated to cold steel knives. The main keyword phrases in this market are cold steel knives and cold steel buck knives. I might want to write my title tag like:

"Buck knives and other knives by cold steel"

Notice that the word knives is used twice, buck is used once, and cold steel is used once. This title tag is relevant to the main keywords that I am trying to target for the page.

Description tag:

* The description tag is the black lettering that appears on the search engine result page. This is located under the blue link (title tag)

*The description tag will also be seen by your target market so make sure that it is eye catching and appealing. This will help with your click through rate

* If you do not use a description tag, search engines like Google will pull content off of your site and place it where the description tag would be on the result listing

* Remember to keep this tag relevant to the keywords that you are targeting on the page. If you used two keywords in the title tag, try to use them again in the description tag along with other keywords that you are going to target on this page.

* Keep the description tag under 250 characters (including commas and spaces).

* Lets say that the two main keywords that I want to target for this page are cold steel knives and cold steel buck knives. Some of the other keywords that I want to target for this page are discount cold steel knives, discount cold steel buck knives, and quality buck knives. Assuming the above is true, my description tag might look something like this:

"Quality Cold steel knives including cold steel buck knives at discount prices."

Notice how each word of the targeted keyword phrases is used? Notice that the keyword phrase cold steel is used twice. Now look at the relevance of the description tag to the title tag that we created for this page. Do you think that the description tag will generate a high click through rate when potential customers find the link on the first page of a result listing?

Keyword tag:

It is my theory that the keyword tag will let search engines know what keywords to look for in the web pages content. This tag will also tell the search engines what keyword databases to index your site in.

* Keep the keyword tag under 250 characters.

* Separate the keywords and keyword phrases using commas and spaces.

* Keyword phrases of three to four words will get you the most relevant search traffic.

* Keep in mind that search engines will not put two keywords together to make one. For example, if your keyword tag reads, "Discount, gifts, Christmas," The search engine will not read, "Discount Christmas gifts", they will index your site under the individual keywords. Make sure that all of your keywords make sense to you.

* If my site is targeting cold steel knives and I am using the above keywords used in the example description and title tag, I might want my keyword tag to read like this.

"Cold steel knives, cold steel buck knives, discount cold steel knives, discount cold steel buck knives, quality cold steel knives"

As you can see, all of the words in my keyword tag match the keywords in my description tag. The main two keywords that we are targeting are used in the keyword, description, and title tags.

After the Meta tags are "up to par" and unique for the targeted page that we are optimizing, the next step is to match the content on the page to the keywords used in the Meta tags.

Content writing: keyword relevancy to page content.

Let us use the book summary that we used in the Meta tag description again. Say you are at the bookstore and you are reading the summary for an action novel; the description that you read sells you and you buy the book. When you get home and start to read the book, you find out that the book is a romantic comedy. Once you realize this, you are very disappointed.

The same thing happens with Meta tags. If a search engine indexes your meta tags and notices that you are describing cold steel knives on the page, but when the spider indexes the page the words cold steel knives is no where to be found, the spider will be disappointed and issue a bad report to the search engine.

You need to make sure that the content on your page matches the keywords targeted in your Meta tags. When writing content for your pages you might ask yourself the following questions:

How many times do I need to repeat the keywords?

Should I repeat the keywords back to back?

In order to create relevant content do the keywords need to be found next to each other, or can the search engine find parts of the keyword phrase in different parts of the web page?

If I use a keyword to much, will my web page be penalized?

As mentioned in the opening statement of this article, when a search engine spider indexes your web site it looks for hundreds of things to grade your site on. The spider that indexes your site does not visually see your site, it sees html and it brings numbers back to the search engine for "scoring". The site with the highest score will be awarded the #1 ranking on the search engine.

Do you need to use the keyword in your content more then your competitor does? No. However, the numbers have to be higher. For example:

Let us say that the #1 site under the keyword "cold steel buck knives" has a lot of content on the page. In addition, the keyword is used in every paragraph, in every link, in every header tag. The more content the site has the more they need to use the targeted keyword to gain high density and keyword relevancy so page content is maximized.

If your site has less content, but the targeted keyword is used more, and the total keyword relevancy to page content is higher then the site that you are up against, then your site has the ability to achieve higher visibility on the result listing.

In order for you to achieve high search engine visibility under a targeted keyword, we would recommend that you get to know your competitors and more importantly, your competitor's content.

Sitting in front of your computer analyzing your competitor's content can be a grueling task. Use our web comp report to identify the percent of your competitor's content. After the report is ran you save the report for future references in your SEO campaign.

If you Meta tags are in place, your content on the web pages matches what is in your Meta tags; you should be in good standings. The next step in SEO 101 is link popularity.

Linking:

Links. Links. Links....and even more links. There are many sites on the internet that will give you SEO advice. It seems like every SEO consultant has a different opinion on "how it should be done". The fact of the matter is that SEO is theory, and the question is, whose theory works the best. Now instead of you outsourcing SEO to different firms getting upset because you do not like the results that they achieve or the "theories" that they practice; DO IT YOUR SELF and learn from your own mistakes. Trust me; it will save you a lot of time, money, and faith in SEO.

Everything that you have read in this article has to do with my firms theories on Basic SEO. In order to get professional guidance after signing up with the SEO tool kit, subscribe with one of our consultants to guide you through your first SEO campaign.

Links are a very important piece of the SEO puzzle. Who cares if you have the best Meta tags in the market? Who cares if you have the best content in your industry? If no one knows who you are, who cares? You need to link up with other websites that are relevant to your market.

Let me take a moment and clear up a few myths when it comes to link building.

* If you are a website owner I am sure you get calls from call centers of SEO firms all the time. If you ever get a call from a company trying to sell you 1,000's of "quality high PR links" for a low price, hang up on them.

* Link farming is out of the question.

* Stay away from FFA's (Free for all)

* Sponsored ads do not count as inbound links.

* Linking up to your competitors will not harm you, it can help you.

* Don't add 100 links one month, then not add any other links the following month. Keep it constant.

Keep in mind that the current trends of the major search engines is quality over quantity. So when you are optimizing your website keep in mind that the main goal is to convert surfers into customers, and customers into repeat customers. For more SEO advice call 1-800-426-4172 and ask to speak with one of our online marketing experts.