Search Engine Optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO, as it's commonly called, is the practice, or art, of:
* making a website/page as "crawler" friendly as possible
* designing a site or page in such a way that it has the potential to rank well in organic search engines for competitive terms which your page/site happens to be about.

Depending on the level of commitment you have to making your site rank well in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN, you can perform all or some of the following tasks. They are listed in a logical order for you to follow:

Domain Names - if you already have a domain name and you want to keep it that's okay. Hopefully it's an easy-to-remember domain if your going for name recognition or "branding." If branding isn't important to you, and SEO is of prime importance, than you may want to register a domain with your targetted keyword(s) in it. Domain names can be conjoined words (widgets.com) or separated by dashes (blue-widgets.com). Before you choose a new domain name you should first perform some keyword research (see next step). Some search engines will favor domain names with dashes, while others will not show them any favoritism. Do a search in the engines for your targetted keywords and look for patterns in the domain and file names of the top 10 results. When you're ready to register a domain name, I recommend GoDaddy.

Keyword Research - this is absolutely critical. Use tools such as Overture's suggestion tool or WordTracker to research keywords. Overture (unfortunately) combines singular and plural words in it's data compilation. These results show the number of searches done for keywords during the entire previous month, on Yahoo/Overture. WordTracker is a much better program. It differentiates between singular and plural word forms (which IS a big deal) and shows you the number of searches in ONE DAY across the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and others).
Type in keywords related to the topic/subject you want your site to be about. Both tools will provide suggestions for related keywords. You want at least 40 or more searches per day for a keyword, otherwise it just won't generate enough traffic for you, even if you are in the number one position in the search results for that keyphrase. 2-3 word keyphrases are best, as one-word phrases are likely to be more competitive.
The next step in doing keyword research is to see how much competition there is in Google. Type in the keyword, and Google will tell you how many results are in it's index for that keyphrase. If there's over a million results, just know that it's going to be difficult to achieve a #1 ranking (not impossible, just difficult). Normally only the first few pages of results are truly optimized for that keyword or phrase, and the rest Google just considers relevant because maybe they mention the phrase on the page somewhere. Your main competitors are on the first few pages of results. If you can't get your site listed within the first 2-3 pages of results, you won't see any traffic.

More to come...

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