Search Engine Optimization is a term every online marketer has heard of on an almost regular basis. It is the fastest growing field in online marketing and it only seems to grow.

Let’s look at some numbers to see just how big search engine optimization is.

• On average, 80% of the traffic to your website comes from search engines.
• According to Berkley, about 7.3 million web pages are created each day.
• Less than 10% of the people online actually optimize their websites for search engines.
• By that measure, about 730,000 web pages are optimized for search engines EVERYDAY.

Fortunately, most pages are not optimized for. Unfortunately, this is a fact that most website developers are becoming more aware of. If you want to succeed in getting more traffic to your website, you have no choice but to learn search engine optimization.

You don’t have to be an expert to optimize your website. You just have to do a few things, do them well and keep doing them over a period of time. Soon, search engines will start to recognize your hard work and index your website higher.

Here are some basics of Search Engine Optimization:

• Research: This step begins even before you start building your website. Once you have decided a topic for your website, you need to do some keyword research. The list of keywords that you come up with will help give a better direction to your website. You have to optimize your pages for these keywords. This is explained later on in this article.
• Content: Use the keywords that you have to build content. Make sure that at least 4-6% of the words in each page of content are a keyword that you’re optimizing for. This is essential for search engine optimization. Search engines use this keyword density to rank pages.
• Tags: As you put content on your pages, you must tag it. There are three types of tags that you need to focus on. Meta Tags, Alt Tags and H-Tags.
• Meta tags: Meta tags go in the background of a page. Think of it as an introduction to a webpage. When a search engine visits your site, it looks for meta tags to find out what the site is about. There are two types of meta tags that your site should have at the very least.
  • Meta description tag: Here you write a brief description of your website. Use your primary keywords here. Search engines read this and look for keywords. Also, this description is what people read when they find your site listed on a search engine.
  • Meta keywords: This is where you list your keywords for each page. This is your way of telling the search engine what the page is about.
• Alt tags: These tags apply to images on your web page. Use your primary keyword as alt tags. That way, even if your picture doesn’t show up on a person’s browser, they can run their mouse over the picture and the alt tag will show up. The main benefit for SEO is that search engines read alt tags as well and they index your page accordingly.
• H-Tags: These tags apply to heading on each page. The heading for each content section is normally made bold and of a larger font size. However, if you set those as an H1 tag for main headlines and H2 tags for sub headlines and you use your keyword as these headlines, it will stand out for search engines and help you to get higher on the page rankings.
• Hyperlinking: Make sure that all your pages are inter linked. This is especially useful when you add new pages to your websites.
• URL: If you haven’t already bough a domain name, you should keep in mind the main keyword of your site and try to find domain names related to it. Try to avoid buying domain names that are very long or have dashes in them. You should keep things simple.
• Site submission: Once your site is built and you are live, you need to submit your sitemap to major search engines like Google. You also need to submit your website to major directories.
• Links: The more links you have coming to your website, the higher it will rank. You can do this buy article marketing, reciprocal link building and posting links in forums and blogs. Use your primary keywords as anchor texts and try to build as many links as possible.
• Update your content often. Search engines love evolving websites.

If you follow the above steps and keep your content quality high, you will be on a guaranteed road to SEO success. The secret is to keep adding new content and building links. If you keep repeating this, your site will catapult in the rankings and by following these basics, you will be a SEO expert.