A Must Read For Every Internet Marketer Doing SEO

Top ten mistakes internet marketers make while learning and doing SEO. How many of them are you making?

Many online education programs claim they are the best way to learn internet marketing yet never even speak of SEO marketing. Before I proceed, I'd first like to define what SEO is. SEO stands for Search engine optimization, and it is the process combining the internet and marketing to fine tune your website so as to get higher rankings on search engines. Knowing SEO is absolutely critical to becoming a master internet marketing guru. Well, you may ask, what's the use of SEO? Well let me tell you, that most Google users rarely navigate to the second page of the search engine listing, and the first pages get most of the traffic. You know what traffic from Google or Yahoo means? It means a lot, millions of hits and lots of ad-revenue. Normally, you could learn SEO by taking an internet marketing course. There are numerous internet marketing courses available today and know which ones have the best SEO courses is crucial to running a successful online business. Before you get carried away by the idea of a million hits, let me show you how to turn many-a-webmaster's dreams into reality.

Use title tags, even though it is not displayed on the page, it happens to be the single most important SEO factor. Aim for 65 characters, and describe the page content perfectly. Include keywords at the beginning and include consistent branding in the title.

Meta tags, though not displayed, are used at meta-data for search engines. Most often, these are used as snippets in the search engine listing. Thus a good and optimized meta tag is very crucial for SEO. Try to include keywords and use data to entice the user into following that link.

For headings, use H1 headings to highlight the main topic. H(2-5) should be used for subcontent. For best results, synchronize them with title tags.

Use Internal links a lot, to build the site's strength in search engines. Additional topics that are interrelated stuff on the same site should always be linked to. But don't over use links. And where possible use innovative links. An example would be 'Related Topics' instead of the regular 'click here.'

Keep content original as search engine listings are penalized by duplicate content. Maintain high keyword density in the first paragraph. Link internally if possible, but if external links are needed, then use keyword dense anchor text. Better yet, use an exit script. Use bold and italics to highlight important text and keyword, as they are given special preference. Images are indexed by their alt tags, so give good image descriptions wherever, whenever.

Use alt tags, as I said before, and use keywords in image links.

Finally, let me discuss keyword density. It's a major issue in SEO, but isn't certainly as tough as it sounds at first. Tricking search engines is tough however. Google is over a decade old, and the engineers at Google know how to produce algorithms that wouldn't be defeated by a keyword dense passage. Optimize the page in a moderate manner, too much can make it unreadable, too little makes is SE unfriendly. Use keywords where ever necessary.

There is a lot more to SEO than simply taking a course on internet marketing and starting your business. Many web gurus today think they are an internet marketing expert. And many of these same gurus have a very impressive internet marketing business education. However, there is no substitute to practice. Practice SEO constantly and gain experience which no tutorial ever can give you.