Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

On page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a little more tricky than off page SEO. From what I have observed, Yahoo®, Ask Jeeves®, and MSN® give more weight to on page SEO than Google® does. However, like I have said before the Search Engines constantly adjust their algorithms, so don’t worry too much about which factors are stronger than others and make your best effort at taking as many factors as you can into consideration when creating your pages.

The bottom line is that having good on page optimization will help your site get ranked well in the Search Engines, but be careful not to over-optimize as some Search Engines might penalize keyword SPAM (repeating keywords everywhere possible in what appears to be a very unnatural way).

The most important on page factors vary from Search Engine to Search Engine. However, for the major Search Engines the two most important factors appear to be keyword prominence, and the title tag. The title tag appears to be more important than keyword prominence, although both are very important to the top three Search Engines (Google®, Yahoo®, and MSN®). I suggest that if you do any on page optimization for your website, that you optimize your title tag, and you make sure your keyword prominence is fairly high (above 80 percent).

This book is not intended to be an HTML tutorial, if you do not know HTML and are doing your website yourself, then I highly recommend learning the fundamentals of HTML. There are many places you can do this online, search for “HTML tutorial”, “HTML beginners”, or “HTML kids” (I find that searching for tutorials for kids is a good way to find beginner tutorials that can be useful to adults as well). For starters here are some HTML tutorials that I think can be of help to most beginners:

http://www.lissaexplains.com/basics.shtml
http://www.goodellgroup.com/tutorial/
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/basics.html
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html

Otherwise, if you have a web master that is creating the HTML, tell them you want them to follow this for your website. Even if they ask for more money to add on page optimization, you should get them to do some of these basic things. When you give them the text for your website be sure to follow the guidelines in this book. Whether or not you know HTML, you should read the next two sections “Keyword Prominence” and “The Title Tag”. They are the most important parts of on page optimization and every online small business owner should understand this if they want Search Engine traffic.