Search engine optimization (SEO) might seem like some arcane formula known only to a select few Internet gurus, but I’m going to share some secrets that’ll hopefully demystify the art of SEO.

If you’ve spent any amount of time doing business online, then you probably know about keywords and keyphrases. But what you may not know is how important these are to your page rankings.

When people go online in search of something the first thing they do is type a word or phrase into a search engine like Google or Yahoo. So it’s important to know where the search engines look for those words in relation to your Web site if you want your pages to show up high in the rankings.

Text Links

A text link is a word or phrase that’s constructed to take visitors either to another page on your site or to another place on the web. Some Web site owners make the mistake of using words like ‘click here’ or even a graphic in order to send viewers to another place.

But generic text links won’t help people find you if they’re typing in specific keywords and search engines can’t read graphics. So you need to construct the link so that the keyword IS the link. For example: If you’re offering web site design services and you want someone to go to your page regarding that, you would use the term ‘web site design services’ as the link.

Title Tags

Title tags are the words that appear at the very top of your browser window. Since each page normally contains a title, you’ll want to use keywords and phrases that are popular among searches so that the search engines will find them.

Don’t use generic terms like ‘Home’ or even cute phrases like ‘Welcome to My Business’. Words like these will get you buried in the rankings. Also be sure that each page on your site has a good keyword or phrase in the title.

Description Tags

Description tags are one type of meta tags. These tags are not visible to page viewers, but are routinely seen by search engines. Description tags are information that’s inserted into the head of your page’s HTML code (if you’re not comfortable coding pages then get a web designer for this). You’ll want to use text that describes your page in this tag. Many search engines use the meta description tag as description that appears in their listings.

Keyword Tags

Keyword tags are another type of meta tag, which aren’t visible to viewers. These are also inserted into the HTML code under the head section.

Keyword tags are passed over by the bigger search engines like Google and Yahoo, but you will still need to use these tags because some of the smaller search engines still see and rank them.

Headings and Headlines

Since search engines look at text in order to find keywords relevant to a search, you need to use those popular words and phrases in headings and headlines for content on your pages.

Headline text codes differently than body copy text and ranges in size from H1, which is the largest to H6. Search engines pay more attention to the larger headlines, so again, if you’re not good at HTML coding, ask a web designer to help.

Body Copy

Body copy of web pages is another place that search engines look for keywords so you want to be sure that you’re using good, highly searched keywords within your page’s content.

You can help the search engines by making these keywords and phrases bold and by using them more than once on the page. It’s also wise to place your keywords as early in your copy as possible.

Some people recommend using your keywords 2-3 times per paragraph, but doing this often creates awkward sounding copy that turns readers off. Today’s web surfers are smarter than ever. They know when they’re getting good content and when it’s just words designed to show up high in the rankings.

There’s no sense in getting people to your website and then giving them garbage to read.

Alt Tags

Alt text are words that appear when you place your cursor over an image on your pages - these are sometimes referred to as mouseovers. Having keywords in your alt tags help with search engine rankings.

While there’s more to SEO than just keywords, they are the most important aspect to getting good rankings. They are the words typed in by searchers and they are the words that are going to bring visitors to your site – so choose and use them wisely.

Dan Thies has a great blog on how your site can get hacked out of Google. This can literally wipe out your web page from Google’s search results.
Read about it here http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/google-proxy-hacking

While you’re there, you may want to download Dan’s free ebook “SEO Fast Start”. It’s an excellent ebook! You will also receive a six-week video course on building links along with the ebook. Download SEO Fast Start here.

Squeeze pages are generally web pages that stand alone to be used as a landing page for a special marketing campaign or offer. These pages usually offer the visitor some information in exchange for their email address or other contact information.

The ultimate goal of these sites is to take the visitor’s information and use it to turn them into paying customers sometime in the future.

Important things to remember

It’s recommended that a squeeze page stand alone rather than act as a home page for your site or any other site. Because they contain such little content, these pages can impede the indexing of a website and the overall page rankings.

Your squeeze page is meant to do one thing — get a customer’s information. Because of that, you’ll want to make sure that there are no other distractions — like links to other sites — that might steer them away before they’ve completed their task.

When choosing a domain name for your squeeze page you should get one that’s close to the name of your giveaway. For example if you’re offering a free report on How to Get Traffic to Your Website you should try for a domain like: getmoretraffic.com.

What you should give away

Although your give-away is just a means to get people to give you their email addresses, it still needs to be something of value to them. It should be something that helps them with a major challenge they’re currently facing like getting more traffic to their web site.

Information products like ebooks, white papers, special reports and audio courses are all great ways to give the person something that’s valuable in exchange for their information.

People will gladly give out their email address for free information that helps them conquer a specific problem.

Following up

The ultimate goal of your squeeze page is to turn visitors into paying customers and the best way to stay in touch with them is by using autoresponders. You can create different messages to be sent out every few weeks after someone has downloaded the free information in your offer.

These messages can be set up to read something like: Since you enjoyed our free report on Getting More Traffic to Your Web Site, you might want to subscribe to our monthly newsletter that provides tips on ecommerce.

With the right offer and the right squeeze page you can develop a huge list of leads to market future products and offers to.