Search Engine Optimization SEO 101 Design
What every website owner needs to know

Newbie 101: Contact Michele today and ask her about the Website Design services and SEO evaluation packages

We all want our sites to be number one in the search engines. Some site owners are willing to work harder then others for their top ten positions. If you are one of those patient webmasters that want to work hard by following the tips found here you will succeed... or shall I say proceed to the top 10 in Google and other Search Engines.

Search Engine Optimization aims to increase the number of visitors to a web site from unpaid, “organic” search engine listings by improving rankings. This website is 100% organic.

First Things First:

You cannot build a beautiful awesome web site and expect immediate gratification. No, you will not hit the top two pages in the search engines for a standard keyword either. To sum this up in a brutal way you will not see thousands of hits to your website, and you will not start making money right away. Think about that for a moment. If it was that easy then everyone would be doing it. What about using the proper meta tags, keywords, and doing all those submissions to the search engines? Do you honestly believe that will get you in the top five alone? Years ago it was much easier to take the top ten search engine spots, but today you are in competition with millions of other people doing the same thing you are doing today. They already have the base keywords and will hold onto them for dear life. They will not go down without a fight, and this is why you need to get ready to battle.

What can you do right now?

You need to have unique quality information on your web pages, and lots of it. Stick to having a nice flow of helpful information, and offer some quality links to other sites that are in the same subject(s) as the content within your website. Write about subjects you love and have plenty of knowledge in, and remember there is always going to be a "newbie" out there so do not overlook writing for those that may be at a beginner level. Set up your website and keep your website organized. A successful website must stay organized so remind yourself that you will have to work on your website daily - weekly.

We have several areas within this website where we list some of the most important steps one must take to have a successful website. If you want the top five on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and more it will take some research, time, and patience.

Content is King?
What's all this about content?

This is one of the first bricks walls you will hit when you learn more about SEO. The biggest question these days in the optimization communities... Is content truly the key to having a popular website? People are going on about content being king and other people are saying content is not king. I decided to tackle this myself and wanted to put my point of view out there to help others understand what this hype is all about.

Content is the information you add to your web page. Typically these are in the form of articles, educational papers, and more. The more helpful content, the more useful the web page is. However in the SEO world we tend to dig a bit deeper because we have to make our web page better then our competitions. So, how do we do this? First let me say that I personally feel the answer to a great website is content, but it is not the king. Anyone can slap up an article, but the question is will that be good enough bring in traffic? So to clear the air here shouldn't the full term be "Quality Content"? To find out lets consider a few things.

Case in point: Take two sites running the same code, one is hugely popular, the other is very quiet. What's the difference? The content, measured by who's there, what they're saying, common interest, by what relevance people find it it, and the new information that they take away from each experience.

Another form of this type of socializing is with e-mail. E-mail only thrives because of its content and subject titles. It is strange that even though there are 100+ spam messages everyone gets each day, people still tend to read the emails, and this is because of a informative subject line that describes the content. Other things to consider when it comes to e-mail is who it is from, and the safety features behind the email (such as email scanning to make sure it is clean). Typically it is the inner content if relevant they will follow up to the bigger content project. Those areas above are what email marketers deal with daily, and if they are good at what they do you will end up reading the email.

My final thoughts: To grab the attention of others in a room a conversation has to be well thought out, intelligent, and all around good or interesting to them correct? If those listening to the conversation appreciated the information they tend to recommend or spread that information around right? So, the conversation was pure quality and now if we write about it we could call it Quality Content. Now the next step is making content more find-able, more usable, and therefore more relevant -- that's a growth area for sure. Just like a good index of a book makes searching easier and relevant. We search the search engines for the content, we search an index of a book to bring us to the content. We cannot depend on an article itself for popularity. We have to use the resources, tools, tips, and interactivity. The holy grail is ... total optimization at every point possible "The full package" quality content, interactivity, optimization, current events, helpful information in a bundle is what is king.

Search Engine Optimization Newbie 101 Design
This is a full time job!

Search Engine Optimization has been known to increase your business income and productivity by 60% or more within the first year. Keeping up with the latest SEO - SEM tips, and keeping quality fresh content on your website will help your site progress to the top 10. If you ignore your website it will end up in the Search engine soup of sludge because you ignored it. Never give up on your site as it will keep working for you if you treat it right.

What about those website owners that want to do Affiliate Marketing? Not only will you have to keep up with the SEO and base content, but you will also have to keep up with your affiliate listings. So many people let their website's go, and next thing they realize they have pages full of links that will not earn them a penny.

Keeping up with your web sites content is really not that hard. Usually a website is about "your" business or your "expertise" on something so you should be able to write incredible articles quite often. If you have products for sale then there is no excuse for not keeping up with complete descriptions and full reviews of your products. Remember this always: The rule is that visitors convert to traffic and they give the site life. Over time the visitor traffic converts to an income. You will need to work on link building and work with others to build relationships with others across your niche. To help you learn more about link building, SEO, and Marketing visit the recommended below link.

Other Recommended SEO Resources

SEO Link Building
Find out how to SEO your website at Lammo.net - A UK Affiliate Marketing Blog renowned for "telling it like it is". Updated several times a week with comments and opinion from many of the UK`s top Super Affiliates.

Meta Tags vs. Quality Content
Which one is better?

Meta Tags vs. Quality Content: Which one is better? There use to be a major debate over SEO specialists for years and it was over meta tags vs. quality content. However, the search engines have changed and now most SEO's are living by the rule that quality content within your web pages is the winner hands down. After reviewing this page be sure to visit our keywords page for even more tips.

I myself have to agree that a nicely written article full of useful information and contains a few keywords will win over the search engines faster then meta tags. I have noticed that my favorite search engine tends to use page titles, descriptions, and keywords within the page content. Some will say that quality content is not king, but I will have to agree with both sides of the SEO expert lines that content alone is not king. What is king is that you carefully create a useful website for your visitors so that they can walk away knowing they had a positive experience.

My advice would be to make sure your web page is helpful to others, do not keyword spam your web pages, and never ever hide keywords within your site. Google is a smart search engine and they will find you, ban you, and then you're out of luck. Read on to find out what you can do.

Which Meta Tags should you use?
by Micheles Paint Shop, 04-15-2008

I will list the tags that I personally feel are helpful to use within your web page HTML code. Each search engine will spider your site differently, and each will use your tags differently. Not all search engines use these tags, but there are some tags you must use if you truly want to be sure you have properly optimized your website so that people can find you in the search engines.

Do not let anyone tell you that all meta tags are not used because that is not true. Like I said each search engine will consider the different tags while spidering your web pages. You can find web sites all over the Internet that offer you information on meta tags and what each is used for. MOST of the tags out there today are useless, but the ones I list here are what I suggest you still use within your code.

Here are the on page areas I would consider starting off with.

First I would hit up the meta tags within my header. There are several meta tags today that are pretty much retired, but these below are critical in my opinion.

The "Title" tag is the critical tag. Google will index you based on this title so be very careful and name each page on your website different. Be sure you name the site so that it matches the web page content. Use your top keyword(s) within this tag. Some people will spam the title, but Google is smart and they can tell when you are spamming. Here is an example of my index page ... my title has several of my keywords, and it is actually the title of my site! <title>Michele's Paint Shop Newbie 101</title>

The "Description" tag also a critical tag to use. It is not required, but Google and other SE's will/may take this description and use it in their search engine result pages. Be sure to describe the web page contents by simply summing it up, and use a keyword or two in this description.<meta name="description" content="Newbie 101 web design and search engine optimization. " /> (note: I do try to cut out as many stop words as possible, but then again I still need to use some of them to keep the flow of my sentences going)

Now lets talk about your "Heading <h1>" tags which are known as <h1><h2><h3> and so on. When you write an article you typically give it a heading title and it generally is a few words to describe what the article or information is about. The search engines will consider this as "important text." Here is an example of a heading I've used on one of my pages. <h1>Which Meta Tags should you use?</h1> You can set the styles of your headings with CSS style sheets. Example my <h1> uses a bold larger black font, and my <h2> uses a bold, medium sized navy blue font. Whatever text you use between your heading tags it should be keyword optimized.

Now for the sites "Body Text." The more helpful information you have on the site the better. Search engines love web sites that offer helpful valuable information. They cannot read your website, but they sure can gather up enough information from the web pages to get a good idea what it is about. They can tell if you are a keyword spammer and more. Don't even bother to try and scam them because it won't work for to long. Try to use your main keywords and phrases toward the top of your web pages, and use them wisely. Consider your code to text ratios by having an article/information that contains over 500 words or more. This number varies among the SEO community, but my experience tells me that 500 or more is better.

Links: consider using "Title Tags" within your links such as this sample <a href="index.php" target="_top" title="Newbie 101 Web Design">Newbie 101 Home</a>

Images: consider using "Alt Tags" to describe your images. Here is a sample <img src="images/mystery-navigation.gif" alt="Bad Design Mystery Website Navigation" />

The tags above will help the visual and hearing impaired.

Average Costs of Search Engine Optimization

Lets take a look at the typical costs of hiring a specialist. What I am about to show you will definitely make your jaw hit your keyboard. Here are the going rates the steps a SEO Specialist would do for you?

Keyword research Optimized copy writing Website analysis Search engine submission Strategic link building Adsense PPC Setup Adwords campaigns Affiliate options Traffic analysis analytics Monthly SEO updates

How much does SEO cost? $400-$1999 -small sized websites $1800-$4999 -medium-sized websites $4999-$19,999 -large corporate websites.

You do not need to waste thousands of dollars to get your site noticed. If you want to really take the search engines by storm then you can with a very small investment on decent information and tools. Be sure to view the #1 Web Site Optimization Software.

We study the Search Engine SEO market daily so that we can bring the newest and best tips to our paint shop just for you. Our goal is to help you maintain a profitable, popular, and safe website with SEO Education. Visit our page that lists the Search Engines that you would want to consider submitting your site to. You also should check out our page on Fake Page Ranks and our SEO News Page!

Steps you can take to properly prepare your website for the search engines.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases:

You want to have both main and unique keywords and phrases. Make a list of what you and your business is about, and select the top ten keywords that best describes your business or products. I suggest you use the tools below to generate the absolute best keywords or phrases for you! Do not get all spammy by adding a keyword in every sentence. In my personal experience your main keyword and phrase should be in your page title and somewhere in the top of your page i.e. the header. If the search engines see that you are filling up your web page with just random text and keywords then they will know. The search engine spiders know when someone is trying to properly optimize and when they are spamming. Play it safe and let an expert program help you with your keyword/phrases. Wordtracker is listed below as that is what the experts use. I've also included other helpful links for you to use.
• Wordtracker #1 Keyword system
• Google Keywords
• Overture Keyword Selector

Site Content | Information :

Information, articles, links, keywords, and phrases. Carefully decide on what content you will add to your site. Write articles on your expertise and/or product. Add a few keywords/phrases to your article title and text to attract the search engines. People will get bored with boring texts so be sure to have a few small accent images and an interactive feature. You can add free things such as a simple poll, guest book, or even a map. The areas below will give you some cool ideas.
• A mix of cool content
• Ezines Articles

Sitemaps :

You want a web site that is easy to navigate and easily spidered by the search engines. I recommend that you do not use some fancy menu that includes a special programming script. If you must use a menu like this *(flash, DHTML, or some other fancy menu) then you must add and use a standard "site map." It is not as easy as it sounds, but with a little time and patience you can design a friendly site that is easy to navigate, and that is found by the search engines. Using proper anchor text (link text) is critical, and the biggest advice I can give on this area is that you never use those horrible words called "click here." Use keywords as your anchor text. Another way to use keywords safely is to use them in your sites image alt tags, but again we do not want to spam this area either so be careful.
• XML Sitemaps
• Sitemaps

 I will state here today that I am 100% legit and proud of it. I like a challenge and will get to the top all on my own without fakery. The truth is that they are looser's in the end because Google will find them and handle them as they see fit (banned usually/hopefully.)