Once you learn how to get your website to appear at, or near the top of the search results for a relevant keyword, you can harvest FREE traffic all day long, month after month, year after year, even for years at a time. For this reason, optimizing for good placement in these FREE results must be the foundation of your online marketing efforts, and is precisely the focus of this tutorial.

You may be wondering why you need to learn this material. In reality, building web sites is pretty easy, and getting easier and easier. However, getting new visitors to your site is not as easy. Building and registering your site with search engines, is not the same thing as making it easy for people to find it. Although SEO is not rocket science complicated, it's not as easy as just building a site, adding some keywords, and waiting for the crowds to find you.

A top placement in Google’s organic search results
means free traffic day in and day out, year in and year out!

Unfortunately, designing and building websites is only half the effort -- the other half is driving traffic to your web sites, and once visitors are there, to keep them coming back. Regardless of the subject of your site, you MUST bring in targeted traffic in a consistent way if you want your web site to thrive.

Most web sites will never get a top ranking in the popular search engines because of simple mistakes. Many web designers know about HTML, and web graphics, and all the other skills needed to create a web site, but lack the knowledge to make their sites work with search engines so they are easy to FIND. 

They don’t know about the importance of keywords, or the role that links pointing to your site play in where the site gets ranked in search results. The truth is, getting and maintaining top placements in the search engine rankings requires that you do a lot a very simple things just right. SEO is not complicated or esoteric, but will require applying proper techniques methodically and consistently.

That’s where this material comes in. The purpose of this introductory article is to give you the basic precepts, principles, tactics, and strategies of SEO, and how to make your web site findable by the right person at the right time. If you want to learn more and dig deepter into this important topic, we reccommend purchasing additional training.

These techniques are not complicated or esoteric, but success will require applying them methodically and consistently, to gain an advantage over competing Web sites that do not know these techniques or who are not using them as effectively as described here. 

Assumtions About You
Before I discuss what I will cover here, let me first review some things I need to assume about you. With a topic as deep and complex as Internet Search, I need to make several assumptions so the presentation of the information is as clear and direct as possible.

First, I am assuming that you are comfortable with your computer, have a basic working knowledge of the web, don’t mind exploring the underlying HTML that comprises web pages, and will you will be patient, systematic and determined with your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

For some of the SEO techniques I will cover, you or a member of your team, will need to know about HTML tags and how to insert them into HTML documents. You will need to able to open a page in a web editor, recognize JavaScript (although creating JavaScript is not necessary), and perform other basic web page creation or editing techniques.

For more info on these topics, purchase an HTML reference, or a course on building basic web sites. 

Given these assumptions, I am confident that your efforts to apply the techniques I cover here will meet with success.

What’s Covered Here
This course covers two dozen SEO techniques that every web designer and content creator/owner should know. The course  material is divided roughly into three parts. The first part will introduce you to the search engines and how to check the current status of your web pages in them. This section includes the basics of how crawler-based search engines work and the differences between search directories and search engines. 

In the next part, I cover keyword phrases and domain names. This section includes information on the importance of optimizing your pages for the correct words, and strategies for building pages that search engines like, so they are indexed in prominent locations in the search results. This is the heart of the course (eBook). 

The last part focuses on links, why they are important, and includes strategies for improving your Links. 

You may already know some of the techniques covered in the course, however no matter your previous experience, I am confident that you will learn many useful strategies that you do not know. If you already know the basics, this knowledge and expertise will provide a foundation from which you can build upon. This foundation will give you the background to understand and apply the more subtle but also more valuable techniques that can make a HUGE difference in your site’s positioning.

If on the other hand, everything covered here is new to you, that’s great too. Since I start with the basics, you will learn that much more. The material will start making sense to you as you apply them to your own web sites. Even the application of the most simple techniques will give you an advantage over the competing sites that are not applying them on their web sites.

Why Search Engines Are Important

Let’s start with some compelling reasons why you should care a great deal about SEO, especially if you are eager to generate more traffic to your web sites. 

How can you pass up the opportunity to be there when your customers go looking for the products, information, or services you provide on your site? Also, how can you ensure that they find you using the right queries? If you are selling Bass Guitars, you are not interested in people looking for a Singing Bass to hang on the wall.

So, the question is, how do you drive targeted traffic to your site? You can’t make sales if no one knows what you are selling. You can advertise, but advertising is expensive and it often doesn't work.  Numerous studies have shown that the most cost-effective way to generate traffic is to employ the help of search engines. In fact, search engines represent one of the single most important source of new visitors to your site.

Although most web surfers reach their destinations by typing a URL directly in their web browser or by clicking on a link from another site, the majority of all site visits begin at a search engine. 

Most of the other visits that do not originate with a search engine represent repeat visits to a site. These are folks who know where they want to go already, and so are repeat customers and NOT NEW visitors.

If you measure just new visitors to web sites, the majority of new visits come through search engines. In fact, some studies suggest that perhaps over 80% of web surfers looking to BUY products or services on the web, start their search at a search engine.

Let's face it, advertising is expensive, and worse, it does not always work. On the other hand, perhaps the best thing about search engines is that they are CHEAP! Provided that you do it correctly, targeting customers using a free search engine is one of the best marketing and advertising deals around.

Obviously, if you have taken the time and interest to learn how to design and build web sites, and have taken the time to build and maintain them, it behooves you to learn about search engines and how to use them to generate traffic to your web sites.

The simple fact is, the potential search market is so big, you can not afford to ignore it. A good placement in Google or one of the other major search engines can sustain a business.

Limitations of SEO
Although a good placement in Google, or one of the other major search engines can sustain a business, contrary to what you may have heard, there is no magic pill or secret optimizing trick that will place a page in the top positions of the major search engines. If there were, everyone would use them and they would stop working. 

Success with SEO instead requires timely information, good technique, patience, and time. SEO is an ongoing project that will take time, effort, and persistence. 

Organic search results can be influenced but never controlled

As we will see here, placements in the organic search results can be influenced but never fully controlled. The search engines and their hidden, proprietary search algorithms control your sites' placements. There are no absolute guarantees that any page will be listed for free in Google, or any other search engine.

If you're smart, and know what you are doing, you can wield a lot of influence over what shows up in the search results. To guarantee placement would require you to purchase advertising. Searchers certainly click on the ads that appear above or to the right of the organic results (if not, Google would not be a multi-billion-dollar compan as the company earns money each time an ad is clicked).

However, most searchers prefer the organic results and also have much more confidence in them. The bottom line is that it is worth the effort to get high placements in the organic search results. 

SEO is a Moving Target
Unfortunately, this will be a constant effort, which is why search engine placement isn't entirely "free." The web is a moving target. Search is continually evolving. Your competitors’ sites are changing, the search results change, even the search engines themselves change all the time. Your site will need to change as well. 

Delete old content. Add new content. Find new ways of providing information or services to your visitors.
You will need to develop a search strategy that evolves continually.

1. Develop a content strategy that keeps your site fresh, relevant, and attractive to both search spiders and visitors.
2. Keep track of which keywords visitors are using to find you in the search engines.
3. Pay attention to new services such as map search, mobile search, or shopping search, that the search engines are always rolling out. Not all will be relevant, but the right ones can open valuable new opportunities.

SEO requires a long-term strategy 
and an on-going commitment.

Start SEO Early
Another tip is to begin planning your SEO from the start. Don’t build first and THEN consider SEO. I include SEO instruction in the very first week of my web design courses, just as students start PLANNING their sites. SEO work is an important consideration at all phases of planning your web sites. 

You want to “bake in” the find-ability of a site from the very start. The time to worry about SEO is now. Concerns and issues need to be raised BEFORE site specifications are finalized, and during the design, development, and build process, and continuing even after site launch.

What every web designer should know about SEO pt.2

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Let’s start our review of search engine technology with the most predominant market share today: crawler-based search engines. Google and BING are both crawler-based search engines. Google is the personification of a crawler-based search engine. It’s also the biggest kid on the block, so let's begin with it.

Crawler-based search sites create their listings automatically by using software called spiders or bots, or crawlers. These terms all refer to the same thing, which is simply a piece of software or automated script that searches the web by jumping, or crawling, from link to link that it discovers. Google’s crawler software is called, appropriately enough, “GoogleBot.”

The major search engines continuously send their bots across the wide expanse of the net, crawling from site to site by following all the links they encounter. In the process, they copy the text and code they find on each page. This process is referred to as “crawling.” It is important to note that not all the information found on each page is stored. TEXT and CODE is stored, but not images or video. Enough text and code is stored to get an accurate idea of WHAT the page is about, and the kind of information contained there. Most  spiders copy entire pages, text, graphics and all.

This enormous index of information is stored on thousands of computers connected in a network and constitutes a vast database. It is this index of sites that have been previously visited (or crawled), recorded, and stored in the database, that the search engines use to provide those lightning-fast results you get when you conduct a search. When you enter a search query in Google, it is this index that you are actually querying, rather than the entire internet itself.

Search Bots Constantly Crawl the Internet
The web changes all the time. New sites go up, old ones disappear, and most successful sites change content frequently. For these reasons, the search engine bots are always crawling the web, visiting and revisiting pages, updating, building, and rebuilding their search indexes.

Each search service has its own set of spiders and uses its own unique set of complex mathematical equations, called algorithms, to organize all the information gathered, and to establish rules for when and how the information will be retrieved when requested by a search. This is why you do not get identical results when you query the SAME terms in two different search engines.

Keywords are search phrases potential customers
enter into the search engines to look for you.

Google currently claims that their GoogleBot spider routinely crawls 4 billion, that’s billion with a B, web pages! Most of these pages end up in the their index, ready to be retrieved when the correct search term is typed in the Google search box. When you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, which can affect how you are listed in these search engines. 

Make it easy for Spiders to Find Your Pages
As a web designer or content creator, you want to make sure you make it as easy as possible for the search engine spiders to FIND and crawl your site. If your pages do not get crawled, they do not get indexed. If they do not get indexed, then they will never be found through the search engines. Pages not in the index are considered non-existent. Instead the searcher will find OTHER pages that have been indexed.
The site links and site architecture that connect the pages and sections of your web site are critically important since they are what the Spiders use to find all the pages of your site. A useful tool for helping spiders find all the pages within a web site is the SITE MAP.

Site Map Page
The most efficient way to set up connections between pages and sections of your web site that search spiders can use to find and index all the pages of your site is to create a specialized links page called a Site Map. The point with sitemaps is to link ALL your pages here, so it’s a snap for the search bots to find ALL of them in your site. Another thing site maps do for you is to provide a convenient way to slip more of your keywords into your pages.

Keywords are the possible search words or phrases (key-phrases) that your potential customers might enter into the search engine to look for you. 

For example, phrases that I would enter into the Google search box to search for information about mountain biking or off-roading in New Zealand might be:

New Zealand tourism
Adventure traveling in New Zealand
New Zealand Adventure tours
New Zealand adventure travel agencies

The text that you use to link to a particular keyword page should contain the SAME keyword that the page is being optimized for.

You will also want to add some content, in addition to all the links, because some search engines refuse to spider pages which only contain links to other pages and nothing else. One solution to address this is to add a short description of the content of each link in the Site map page. This ensures that the search engines will index your site map page. More about links, including how to get links from external sites pointing back to your SITE, a bit later. But for now, let’s move on to the next topic: “Checking the status of your web site in the popular search engines."

Checking the Current Status of Your Sites

If you are optimizing an existing site, the first thing you need to do is find out if your site is already listed in the more popular search engines. Google stores on its servers the first 102 K of every page it indexes. Since most pages are smaller than this, Google’s index stores nearly every word of every page that its GoogleBot crawls.

Checking page caches
To see these page snapshots in the Google index, check the cache of a page by entering:

cache:mydomain.com/mypage

in the query box. Replace “mydomain.com/mypage” with your actual URL. To get results, try it both with and without the leading www. Click the Search button and Google will check to see it if has your page in its cache.

A cache is a temporary storage area where a file is placed. In this context, it is the web page stored in one of Google’s servers. Google may tell you that it has nothing in its cache for that page, but this does not necessarily mean that the page is not indexed. It could be that Google just has not gotten around to caching it. 
If Google does not return ANY results try removing or adding the www.

Site: www.mydomain.com/mypage

The Google Toolbar
Let me now introduce you to some helpful tools to measure these elements on Google. Google provides a free toolbar for the Firefox browser that puts a Google search box right in the top menu. This can be very helpful because, among other things, you can use it to see the "PAGE RANK" popularity score of any page you are viewing. The information loads within seconds, and is definitely worth adding to your browser.

To get the toolbar, go to toolbar.google.com and follow the instructions there for downloading and installing this invaluable Firefox plug-in.

After you have installed the toolbar, you can use it to gather information about the contents of Google’s index including:

1. Page Rank
2. Snapshot of the Cache of the Page
3. Similar Pages
4. Backward Links

More about Page Ranks and finding Similar Pages and Backward Links later, but for now, let’s use the Toolbar to check page caches. You can apply this technique to any page, but let’s start with your site’s homepage.

1. Open your homepage in your browser
2. Click on the "I" (info) icon on the Google Toolbar
3. Select Cached Snapshot of Page from the drop-down.

If Google has indexed your page, it will load a page showing you what it has in its cache.

Examining Your Pages: Page Titles and Page Descriptions

Title Tags
Page titles are the most important element to check on your web pages. If you are creating new pages, start by writing a short but descriptive title for every one. Page titles are critical to SEO work. All your pages should have them and they should be as clear and as descriptive as possible.  

Always start new pages by writing a short but descriptive title. Make sure all your page titles are as clear and as descriptive as possible.. One aspect of SEO work is the ability to write concise title copy. The reason is that titles display in a browser’s title bar, which labels the browser window to your operating system, which makes it easier to spot if you have more than one browser window open. Search engines read the title to get a clue about what the page is about. Titles are also what appear in the clickable links area in a search engine results page. Page titles are so important because improving a page’s title is one of the easiest ways to not only improve a page’s ranking, but also increase the number of people who actually CLICK on the link.

Most experts recommend limiting your titles to less than 65 characters, but using 8-10 is better, as this produces more focused titles.

Here are typical problems to avoid with your title tags:

1. Missing Titles
   This is a common and very serious mistake, because you are not giving the search engines one of the most important pieces of information about a page.
    
2. Vague or Nondescript Titles
    
3. No Keywords
   Terms and phrases that users use to search for your web site are missing.

Check your Description tags
Another thing to check with your pages are their Description tags. The Description tag, called a meta-tag because it’s not displayed by the browser, is indexed by some search engines because they assume it describes the contents of the page. In some cases, search engines display the meta-description right under the clickable title, so you can use the description tag to provide the search engines a description of the page.

However, Google doesn’t always do this. It often finds the words it is crawling for in the page, grabs a chunk of words before and after, and displays these as the page description. In other cases, if Google can’t find any search terms in the page (maybe it found them the domain name or the page title), it may substitute the DESCRIPTION TAG here. This happens often enough that the Description meta-tag should be given important consideration in your SEO work.

Pages often have the same problem with DESCRIPTION tags as they do with the TITLE tags:

1. They are missing completely
2. They contain vague or confusing words
3. They contain incorrect terms
4. They lack keywords

Examining Page Content and Page Links

Some pages have perfectly good content but it is unavailable to the search engine because it consists completely of graphic images and not text. Text is the only page content the search bots can index and many sites have no text on their home pages and often very little on the interior pages as well.

Text Bias
The web’s search engines are biased toward ranking text-heavy content. This is the case for several reasons:

1. The first is history. 
   The early web, and the search engines that found information on it, was originally academic research oriented. It dealt mostly with text-based information. Search engines therefore mostly indexed text.
    
2. Search engines need something easy to index. 
   It is easier for search engines to base their relevancy judgments on simple text rather than more complex information such as graphics, audio, or video. When you type a search term in a search engine, it simply looks for the words you provided. If your web site is built with only a few words, it’s at a disadvantage right from the start.

Other potential problems include:

• Flash intros
• Incorporating text into graphic images rather than using readable HTML-based text
• Relying on flashy visuals instead of useful quality content
• Using text that does not contain any of your keywords

I will cover the important topic of keywords a bit later.

Every page  home page

There are several other common problems that can prevent the search bots from finding content on your pages. Pages can contain plenty of indexable text content, but if it is difficult to find or is poorly organized, confusing or unpredictable, the search bots may not be able to index it anyway.

For example, in this site, the primary navigation buttons uses JavaScript to jump from page to page. Since search engines ignore JavaScript, they will not find these links nor visit any of the other pages on this site. One way to fix this is to create a Sitemap page that is linked to every other page of your site, as I reviewed earlier.

In the old days, a site’s homepage also served the function of a site map. Site visitors would access your web site from a central homepage, which had links to all your other pages. The homepage did much of the work of branding, navigation, and search bot routing.

However, these days, thanks to search, any and every page that shows up in search results can be a potential site entry page. Visitors can now enter your web sites from many pages. For many sites, homepages no longer function as the gateways they did before search became the primary method through which users navigate the Net.

For searchers, this new situation is more convenient, but for the web site authors, the importance of optimizing each of these potential landing pages is now very much greater.

Any and every page that shows up in search 
results can be a potential site entry page.

With Search, Every Page on a Site Becomes a Potential Home Page
The lesson here is that every one of your pages that appears in a search engine can be a potential home page. Each therefore must:

• be clearly branded with the identity of the site
• have clear navigation to all the other pages of the site
• have informative and accurate page titles and section identifiers
• have search capabilities
• and very importantly, the actual page content must match the searchers' expectations based on the title and description as seen in the search results.

Search now allows visitors to cut right to the chase. Do not try to attract them with lengthy intros and other filler, or channel them into your site from pages filled with marketing propaganda. Just get ready for them when they get there.

Use the various elements you see on my web site here, including breadcrumbs, logos, page titles, menus, and section identifiers, to help your visitors easily locate where they are, and understand and locate your content so they can quickly start consuming your information.

What every web designer should know about SEO pt3.

Keywords

Keyword Research
The root of all success in search engine optimization begins with keywords. Get them wrong and virtually everything about your online endeavor will fail; it’s just that critical. We have seen more than a few people waste their money because they did not optimize for the correct keywords for their business.

After all, what good is a high ranking for a particular keyword if no one searches for the keyword, or if the people who do are not looking for the products and services that you provide?

Your web site content should be built around your keywords, so hold off building, or even designing, your site until AFTER you have done your keyword homework. Since you will need to include on your pages the keywords that visitors could use to find you in the search engines, you will want to wait on any page construction until after you have researched these key words.

For example, if your site is about providing eco-tours in New Zealand you may want to include key-phrases such as:

Mountain biking tours
New Zealand kayaking

Actually, you will not know the best keywords to keep until you have done some keyword research. To start, brainstorm a list of every possible search word or phrase (key phrase) that your potential customers might use to look for your information, products, or services. Remember that keywords are terms that SEARCHERS use, not necessarily the ones you use in the office. Forget about the language you use inside the company.

Ask customers, potential customers, co-workers, and friends what terms or phrases they would enter in a search engine to find similar products, services, or information, and add these to your growing list of potential key-phrases. Take your time. Try to be as inclusive as possible. Next, I will show you how to use more analytic and systematic techniques to winnow down this list.

Using Analytics and Keyword Search Tools

Brainstorming, together with surveying co-workers and clients, is a great place to start building a potential keyword list. But you will also want to use more analytical tools to help in your keyword research.

Take a quick look at your site logs by using the web analytics software used by your particular host. Most host providers have them, or you can use Google’s terrific FREE Analytics program to help you analyze your server logs

Sign up for a free Google Analytics account at:

http://www.google.com/analytics

Among many other things, these analysis programs capture the actual search keywords that were used to FIND your pages. Take a look at your Google keyword data, and add these words and phrases to your keywords list. Of course analytic tools like these only show how a site is reacting to search engines now. A poorly optimized site will display few keywords in the logs.

There are also tools designed to help you find out which terms are used most often and can provide accurate statistics on the popularity of one keyword versus another. SEO pros use these tools to find out which keywords are more popular and to remove unpopular words and phrases from their lists.

WordTracker 
WordTracker takes a statistical approach to the problem of finding your best keywords. It provides direction to the potentially confusing task of choosing the best keywords for your site through the use of an interactive system that will coach you through this process the very first time, and without any guessing.

Wordtracker has access to data from several large meta-crawlers. Meta-crawlers are tools that search multiple search engines for you. Dogpile is an example of a meta-crawler (www.dogpile.com). If you type a word into DogPile’s search box, it will search Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and many other search systems for you.

WordTracker collects information on over 150 million searches per month from these search systems and from other meta-crawlers as well. It stores two months of searches in its databases, organizes them, and provides this information in an easy to use format to its customers for a fee.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com 
Many of the keyword research tools will try to extract money from you, but one terrific keyword tool is Google’s AdWords keyword page. This tool is primarily designed to help Google’s PAID search advertisers, but the price is right, its database deep, and it's easy to use. This tool should definitely be a part of your regular keyword research regimen.

Type in a term such as “Adventure Travel” and Google provides a list of related terms together with advertiser competition, which is the number of advertisers bidding on this term. Of the most use to us here however, is the search volume for these terms in the Google search engine for the past month and the past year.

Trellian’s Keyword Discovery Tool (www.trellian.com)
Unlike Google Adwords, which only provides results on Google's own search engine, Trellian collects search data from a variety of search engines and tells you the actual numbers of searches conducted on a term. At the time of this writing, the free version provided only the top five results. The paid version provides more comprehensive results.

Analyzing the competition for keywords

Now let’s add to your keyword list by analyzing your competitors’ pages. You can easily check on your competitors by typing your top keywords in a search engine and seeing which sites come up near the top of the rankings. For each of your competitors in the top three positions of the search results, make a note of their domain names and page titles. Look at their source code and find the meta-tags containing page descriptions and keywords.

After entering your top keywords and researching the competition in this way, refine your list by running each term through the keyword research tools described above. Remove, terms that are unpopular, too broad, or too ambiguous. Also remove terms that are too popular and thus over-competitive.

Read on to the next section for additional tips on refining your keyword list.

Refining your Keywords

Once you have generated a list of potential keywords by brainstorming, asking clients and co-workers, researching the competition, analyzing server logs with Google Analytics, and comparing the relative popularity of terms using keyword search tools like WordTracker and others, you now need to refine your list.

Add spelling mistakes
Scan through your list and add obvious spelling mistakes. Some spelling mistakes COULD be very important, with as much as 25% of all searches consisting of misspelled words. If the traffic from a misspelling is significant, you may want to create a page on your site that takes full advantage of this misspelling. Many sites, including Google, contain “Did You Mean...” pages.

Include plural words
Also, include singular and plural examples of the keywords. For example I include both "geek manual" and "geek manuals" in my keyword work, and even register both domain names in anticipation that a percentage of visitors will use one or the other.

On the other hand, there is no need to worry about upper versus lower-case letters. Search engines are not case sensitive. For example, “Used Books,” “used books,” and “used Books” are all equivalent.

Favor keyword phrases over single words
You probably noticed that I am using a lot of phrases instead of single words in my initial list. There is a deliberate reason I did this. Multi-word key-phrases are generally more effective than one-word keywords. The reason is, web users are getting savvier. They have discovered they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases rather than individual words.

Research has shown that most people are now searching
for two- or three-word key-phrases, rather than for single words.

Secondly, one- or two-word keywords are usually extremely competitive. A search for "tourism" or "bike tours" in any search engine will probably generate hundreds of thousands of pages. While it’s possible that you may get your page in the top 10 for such a single-word keyword, it is quite unlikely.

The last reason to focus your efforts on multi-word key-phrases is that they are much more likely to get you targeted traffic. When people search for "bike tours," they are not necessarily looking for bike tours in New Zealand - they may be interested in upgrading their touring equipment.

Even if you did get your site into the top 10 for “mountain bike tours,” you gain nothing from such visitors. However, someone searching for "New Zealand mountain bike tours" is much more likely to book a tour from your New Zealand bike touring company. Your time would be much better spent trying to get a top ranking for this key-phrase.

Be as specific as possible in  your choice of key-phrases

 The idea to take from these examples is this; when thinking up your potential keywords, try to be as specific as possible in your choice of key-phrases. Be specific about the location of your business, e.g., “Las Vegas airport shuttle.” Be specific about the services you provide, or specific about the type of information you have, e.g., “free online Photoshop CS4 tutorials.”

 What every web designer should know about SEO pt.4

Domain Names

Choosing Domain Names

Now that you have narrowed your keyword list, the next thing you need to do is to search for available Domain Names containing your keyword phrases. A domain name is the name -- optionally prepended with "www." -- that visitors will type into their browsers to find you, such as www.vtc.com to find my publisher, or www.geekmanuals.com to find my web site.

There are a number of services that make it easy (and fun!) to search for available domain names. Enter “domain name registration” into Google to find a handful of them. Search around for the best prices.

There are two reasons why your choice of a domain name is so important.

1. Search engines and Directories assume the domain name is relevant to keywords contained in the name and will give you a boost in their rankings.
    
2. Having your keywords in your Domain Name will improve your rankings for queries including the keyword phrases.

When researching available domain names, don’t rule out names containing dashes, especially if your desired name is already taken. Domain names containing dashes sometimes fare better in the search results than those without. Some search systems actually prefer domain names with dashes. It’s also easier to find available domains containing your keywords if you use dashes.

1. new-york-dentist.com
2. new-zealand-bike-adventures.com

It’s also possible to get good results with names containing double-dashes separating keywords.

If your desired domain name is already taken in the .com variety, you may also want check to see if .net or .org is available. Other possibilities include .us, .biz, .tv, .info, or .co. These names are not as good for branding purposes, since most people tend to remember them all as .com’s. However, search engines treat all of these varieties equally. The main reason you’ll find better availability for these types of names is that there are far fewer of them in use.

The most important thing to consider when searching for an available domain name is to find names containing your most important keywords so your keywords appear directly in your site’s URL. If using multiple keywords, place the most important keywords first.

Domain names can be registered with up to 63 characters including the ".com" part. With this in mind, a lawyer specializing in family law in Las Vegas might consider registering:

family-law-lawyer-las-vegas.com

or even

family-law-legal-services-las-vegas.com

which happens to be only 39 characters long.

The key, again, is to get a domain name containing your keywords. This is strategically critical, and will probably get more important in the future. By registering all the possible keyword combinations you can think of, you’ll not only have them available to your company when needed, but you've effectively prevented your competition from using them.

Register all possible keyword combinations, making them available to you 
but also effectively preventing your competitin from using them.

One last thing on this topic - if your company name is in your domain name (like mine: geekmanuals.com) that’s fine, but you should also consider all relevant keyword-rich domain names pertaining to your goods or services. This will give you the option of setting up specialized sites that are more visible to the search engines and directories. Think of it as investing in the future, for a later time when you may want to “build” on your domain name.

Registering Domain Names

Once you have come up with some potential domain names, registering them is a simple two-step process.

1. Check their availability.

2. Pay the registration firm to register it.

You can check for available domain names at a variety of locations.

If you search Google for:

“REGISTER DOMAIN NAMES”

you will get a list of sites to both check the availability of names, and to register them.

Registration will typically last 2 years. Prices and services vary, so you will want to shop around for the best deals. You can start with the following registration services:

www.doteasy.com
www.networksolutions.com
www.godaddy.com

Creating Keyword Rich Pages

Let’s now go over some guidelines for designing pages that search engines like and that are more likely to get top ranking in search results.

At this point, it is instructive to remember a popular SEO adage:

“In the beginning, there was the word.”

SEO, above all else, is about only ONE thing - TEXT. Remember, the words on your pages are the ones the search engine MATCHES to queries. The closer the match, the greater the likelihood of that page being relevant to a search query.

However, that being said, first and foremost, all web sites should be designed with the end user in mind, NOT the search engines. The goal is to get users to take some desired action such as purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter, or read a blog post. Just because Yahoo and Google ignore that glossy product shot, that same image could be a critical factor for a visitor to purchase the product pictured in the image. In the end, what it all comes down to is that a user friendly site is a search friendly site.

A user freindly site is a search freindly site.

The list of page design Do’s and Don’ts that I detail in this section of the QuickStart Guide, shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but as guidelines. If you decide to BREAK one or more of these rules, then compensate in another area.

Always use your own design judgment, and what ever you do, always conduct usability tests to ensure that the your pages are at least as pleasing to your human visitors as they are to search engines, if not more so.

So here are the rules:

DESIGN DO's

1. Create keyword-rich pages
Once you have refined your keywords, plan your pages so that each page focuses on just one or two of them. Create Keyword Rich Pages in which a particular keyword phrase is repeated a number of times so that the frequency of that phrase is higher than for any other words or phrases

High-quality, keyword-rich, written content is the single-most fundamental element of successful SEO. Good copy is ALSO important to your human users, so this is win-win. Get your copy correct and you win with good SE placement. Get it right and your visitors ALSO win with clear, accessible, usable content

2. Locate keywords in prominent locations on your site. 
Always locate keywords at the top of the page, in the title, in the meta-tag page description and so on. A keyword located at the TOP of the page is more prominent than a location further down. Likewise, a word at the FRONT of the title tag is more prominent than the words at the end. Place your primary keywords in the TITLE tag of the page, preferably as the FIRST word. As mentioned previously, title tags are a very important component of a Web page.

3. Use Meta-tags
Meta-tags are special HTML tags used to carry information that can be read by browsers (and search spiders too) but that are not displayed in the browser.

Although meta-tags are no longer used to determine a page’s ranking, the meta-description tag is still used by many search systems as the SUMMARY for a page when it’s listed in the search results. The bottom line is, search engines don’t use meta-descriptions, but real live potential customers do. It’s what tells them whether your site is relevant to their search. Think of meta-tag descriptions as short advertisements for your site. If written well, it will entice the searcher to click your link and visit your site.

If you omit the meta description tag, the search engine will likely construct a description for your site based from text randomly grabbed from somewhere on your page. Have a look at this search results. I am pretty sure this company did not intend for ???? to be used as their site description, but that’s what they got because they failed to use a meta description tag on this page.

Another reason the description meta tag is important is that Google and other search systems do INDEX the description. So the rule here is that for every page on your site, include a relevant, descriptive, and enticing meta-tag description.

4. Meta KEYWORD Tags
In general, the only other meta-tag relevant to SEO is the meta-keywords tag. Although more important in the early days of Internet search, meta-keyword tags are NOT as important these days. Although still useful, you need to be cautious in their use. Some search systems, including Google, ignore meta-tag keywords, because they have been abused in the past while others, reportedly Inktomi used by the Yahoo search system, do still use them.

5. Tag Media Files
By now you know that search engines only index plain TEXT- Images, videos, MP3 audio and Flash animations are all pretty much invisible to a search engine. A fundamental component of SEO work is to make these files work for you by giving your media files clear, descriptive names the search engines CAN see. Make sure the folders these files reside in are open and ACCESIBLE. For example, don’t link to them solely through a via JavaScript menu.

Add descriptive text to the ALT attribute in the file’s tag. Make it short and too the point with keywords. Lastly, add text Captions adjacent to the media to help the search engine “understand” what the file is about.

6. Use Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumbs are just hyper links that help users and search engines alike FIND pages. Keyword-rich breadcrumb navigation at the top or side of a page help users understand WHERE they are in your site and provide a nice roadmap for spiders.

7. Link Internally 
Create as many links as possible to other pages containing the same keywords. If possible, link to other pages which have the keyword in the file name. Also, use you keywords in the linking text connecting to the other pages.

DESIGN DON'TS

Avoid Splash Pages
Splash pages tend to be graphic-heavy and text light- Even worse, they only link to ONE page, wrongly implying that it is the only page of importance on your site.

Avoid Flash Pages 
Flash sites give spiders trouble. They often consist of a single web page, and there is no way a one page site can index multiple keywords.

Avoid JavaScript Menus
Instead use search friendly CSS-based drop-down menus. If you must include JavaScript menus, always include a secondary, text-based navigation because JavaScript links are not navigable by spiders.

Avoid Duplicate Content
Never have identical text content appear on multiple domains or within multiple pages.

Avoid Dynamic URL’s
URLs crated by Site Management Systems or middleware such as PHP and ASP, create URLs that constantly change rather than remain static. These dynamic URLS also give search engines trouble. They are hard for the Spiders to follow and can create duplicate content. Learn the various tricks and hacks for converting dynamic URLs into more search engine friendly STATIC URLs.

Avoid Frames and Inline Frames
These are yet more types of pages that are difficult for search engines to spider because they separate pages into 3 or 4 files, rather than just one.

Conclusion

So there you have a basic review of the essential SEO tools and techniques that all web designers should know. This is just an introduction, if you want to learn more, or need to optimize for more competitive key phrases, purchase some SEO trainings or courses.