If you were to ask me what to do first, I would probably say that your should learn something about SEO and optimization before you build your site. Since you probably already have a site, this is a moot subject. What you will need to do is learn the SEO techniques and then apply them to your site by making changes to it.



I have seen many people make the mistake of jumping into SEO without having the knowledge to really make the correct changes to their site. These people inevitably load their pages with keywords and do a lot of things that are just going to hurt your ranking, or the ability of your site to ever be ranked.

Something to avoid is overuse of your keywords. It happens all the time too. People just don't understand the history behind the spider spamming and think that more is better. 50 keywords on your page will probably get you banned for that keyword. Five on the page may well get you listed high for it. Algorithms are always changing and there really is no one keyword density for any given page. This is something that has roots in all the other facets of your page, everything else that is there, and where any given keyword appears, whether it's in heading tags, or just text. Get lots of inbound links.

Optimization is something that really needs to be studied, and learned about. You cannot just jump in and all of the sudden know how to optimize a website. It is a lot of common sense, yes indeed, but it is certain knowledge of exactly what to do that will make all of the difference to the final product, and your rankings on the search engines.

Let's face it, without listings "above the fold", (visible without scrolling) on the first page at Google, you are just not going to get many visitors. You need to get your site into these top positions in order to make any real advancement in your online marketing.

You will get 99% of your traffic from Google, MSN and Yahoo! No doubt about that. You need to optimize your site for these engines. By this I mean take each page of your site and optimize each part of the page for these engines.

There are many optimization techniques, both on-site and off-site. The main on-site changes you will want to make will be to improve or add on the 1) title tag, 2) code attributes (alt=, title= and summary=), 3) keyword density, 4) use of H1 and h2 tags, maybe even using H3 tags, 5) your navigation and anchor text used, 6) meta description and keywords tags and 7) internal linking. Get all these things right and you have the major SEO efforts taken care of.