There is a lot of information about search engine optimization (seo) going around online and not everything what people tell you is true. There are e-book authors out there who tell their readers not to include any meta tags in their websites. They say that search engines don't read the meta tags these days. Do not believe these things read this article to get a real picture about seo.

The right keywords

Before you can start with search engine optimization, you need to know for what keyword you are going to optimize your website. Finding the right keywords is the first step to take and also the most important one. If you choose the wrong keywords, then you will have a hard time getting into the top 10 search results. You need to find keywords with very low competition so that you can reach a top 10 position even with little back-links.

When you are searching for the right keywords make sure they have less than 100.000 competing websites on google. You can get this number by doing a simple search on google. With the results they also show the number of results. The lower the number, the better for you to get a top 10 ranking. The figure you need to care about is the number of monthly searches for your keywords. Make sure you use keywords that people are actually searching for. You can use several tools to get the number of monthly searches, for example the overture tool or the wordtracker tool.

Onpage Optimization

Nobody knows the algorithm of the google search engine, so nobody can tell you for sure how exactly your website has to look like. Only through a lot of testing and tracking you can get a hint on what you need to change on your website to get a better ranking. There are still some basic things that you want to look at:

- The Website Title (in the header section of your html source code) should have your keyword included. It should not be longer than 10 words.

- The Meta Description is used to display the search results, even at google. That's why a good meta description is very important!

- The Meta Keywords are not that important but you should make sure that your keywords are included. Don't include keywords that can not be found in your body text and do not practice any keyword stuffing methods.

- The Body Text. Google doesn't look much at your keyword density but they look if your keyword is included. That means use your keywords throughout the text where it makes sense but don't worry about having a 1% or 3% keyword density.

- The H1,H2,H3 tags. Search engines love structured documents, so they also love the headline tags. Use your keywords in the h1,h2 and h3 tags but don't do any keyword stuffing.

- Image alt tags are very important if you do not have much text on your website but can also help to increase your ranking if you have much text. Use keywords in the alt tags but again do not use them too often.

These are the most important on-page factors to look at. Of course you need to have a valid html code and a good link-structure but the above points are major important and can boost your ranking when done right. Always remember that you can only get a top 10 ranking by also doing off-page optimization.

Off-Page Optimization

A lot can be done wrong when doing offpage optimization. Google had a major update on his algorithm at the beginning of 2007. Did you remember the google bombs that used to make pages rank for not relevant search terms? Doesn't work anymore since that update! They have also updated their spam detector, a lot of peoples websites dropped in the search results because they used paid advertisements at certain traffic portals and other grey-hat methods. The way to go nowadays is called "natural link building". This means you create links over a very long time period using different methods. If you submit to directories, then submit to 10 directories every day over a period of 100 days. This way it seems as if your links were build naturally by other people.

There are many ways you can get back-links to your website in a natural way. You can:

- provide good content and people will link to you without any effort on your part. This is the most natural and most effective way of link building!

- write articles and distribute them to many different article directories. Your articles get picked up by other people who publish your article at their website with a back-link to your website. This way of building back-links is still very natural and can't be detected by search engines. In the worst case they would not count the links in the article directories or only count them once because of duplicate content.

- do 3-way link exchanges. This means you have 2 different websites on 2 different servers with 2 different ip's. You exchange links with other websites by placing their link on your first website and then place the link of your second website on their website. This way you get 1-way links to your second website.

Avoid things like guest-book spamming, ffa sites, link-farms and websites with more than 100 links on the page where your link will be. Finally work on building links every day over a period of at least 100 days. This way you ensure a continues growth of your link-popularity.