Basic SEO For Your Site or Blog
If you are wondering how to do basic SEO for your website or blog, here are some tips and strategies that you could use to help with your search engine optimization project.
It's not much use owning an amazing website or blog if no one will ever get to read it.
To get visitors showing up, you need to get your site in front of eyes and using SEO is one way of achieving that.
Of course it is perfectly possible to make money online from affiliate marketing without a website or blog. However, for the purposes of this article, I will assume that is what you have and you want to know how to get eyes on your hard work so it makes you some income.
There are others as well, but this article will focus on this particular aspect of free traffic generation.
What is SEO?
I'd like to take a look at some basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) after explaining what it is and how it works. This is an aspect of Internet Marketing that is essential to getting your work at home website or blog into a decent placement in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in the future.
Basically, to make money with a website, you need visitors to see it. Getting those visitors (we'll call it traffic for simplicity) to your site can be done in a number of ways. Some you must pay for and others come with no monetary cost attached.
SEO is the no cost version and this basically means getting your site to occupy a position on page 1 of Google's search results. I use Google as my example since it is the search engine with the lion's share of all the world's organic search traffic.
Hence it's name: search engine optimization, refers to the optimizing of your website (or blog) to satisfy the search engine ranking algorithm that tells it that your site is worthy of being placed in a place where it will be seen by the most traffic.
We do this both on-site, by optimizing the content, titles, images, layout and load speed and off-site by accumulating hyperlinks (we call them backlinks) from other website and blog owners that are so impressed with your site's content that they feel disposed to reference it in their own articles.
Optimizing a Website or Blog
One aspect of this is all about choosing the right domain name for your website or blog.
That really depends on what your website/blog is going to be all about. This is called your niche, or theme or topic and should be reflected in your choice of domain name. By way of an example, let's assume that your theme is, like this section of the site about "working at home".
I'll assume you've got yourself some professional hosting set up as explained in the previous post, so now you need a domain name that best describes your website or blog. I can already hear you saying "But all the really good domain names have been taken by other people!" and you'd be right. Well, almost.
There are still some options that you can exploit.
First of all, in a domain name you should consider what comes after the dot. By that I mean the .com part of your domain. To be honest, if you want to be taken seriously as a work at home business and make money doing it, don't bother with any other extension.
Why?
The reason being that when a business domain name is dropped into conversation, it's assumed that it is a .com domain.
That makes it even harder to find a good, descriptive domain name for your site without having to settle for one a mile long. But there's more to it than your domain name being descriptive. It must include your main keywords. Keywords are the search terms that people will type into the search engine search box to find websites or blogs like yours. That narrows it down even further!
So why is it important to have your keywords in your domain name?
A Concise Lesson in SEO
The reason your main keywords should be in your domain name is that the search engines place more emphasis on keyword matching meaning that the more of your keywords on your site that match up, the better potential your site has for a higher placement in the SERPs. This is not the only deciding factor, but it does go some way to influencing it.
So what should match?
Well, the keywords in your domain name should match the main keywords in your site header's meta tag, your title and your main h1 headings in your header and your body text as well as any anchor tags, alt tags, h2, h3... etc header tags, and bolded text. That's what the search engines are looking to find and when they do, they will rank your site higher than one that does not do these things.
Simple as that.
In your body text, you must also repeat your keywords some times, but don't overdo it or you'll be seen to be spamming your own site by what is known as "keyword stuffing". To achieve an optimum keyword density in your content, you need to between 1% and 2% of your word count to be keywords, with 1.5% being about optimum.
So how do you find the right domain name?
You Have to Get Creative
Personally, I'd been racking my brains for a relatively short, descriptive and at the same time keyword based domain name centred around the keywords: "work at home" for this project. Well, to be honest I couldn't find anything suitable, so I decided the best way around the problem was to use a subdomain with the keywords in.
I'd already set up a Make Money blog/website using this idea but it still had a very long double-barrel name. I wanted to shorten that domain name and then add the keyword rich subdomain.
As all the usable short top level domains had also been taken, I happened upon the fact that there are still many four character top level domains still available as long as you don't mind them being meaningless.
For my purposes, that was exactly what I wanted. A nondescript top level domain that I could generate many keyword based subdomain names and none of them would conflict. The result can be a base for creating several other websites using the same non-descriptive top level domain to hold them all.
You can create a basic website homepage or even a full site on the domain, but it doesn't really matter if you don't actually use it for anything specific.
So with a keyword rich subdomain name, you can effectively create the first step for SEO'ing a website or blog to the best of its potential. This can certainly help to attract more customers to your online business website, which means more money for you.
With a lot of information in your armory, you'll have all the SEO knowledge at your fingertips to optimize your own website or blog to easily compete with the sites at the top of the search engines.
That's all for now. In other articles I'll be looking at further ways to enhance other aspects of your home working business so you can make money from it.
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