Simple SEO Tips - Thrive Learning Institute

Here are a few tips and simple rules from Thrive Learning Institute you should follow to improve easily your rankings in the different search engines. Nothing new and nothing very complex but good tips that work straight from the knowledge base of Thrive Learning Institute.

So, I hope you enjoy reading this little "SEO Beginner Guide" and I hope it helps you grow your traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a set of techniques and strategies to optimize websites for the search engines and get better rankings on the search results of those engines.

There are a few more abbreviations and terms you should now if you start learning SEO, among others:

SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages.

Anchor text: Text used as a link.

Backlink: Any link pointing to your web site. Also called Inbound link.

One-way link: When a site or page has a link to your site, and your doesn't have any link back to it.

Keywords density: Relation of a keyword to the other words in a web page element. For example, the web page title <>This is just an example for a web page title< / title > has a keyword density of 20% because 7 out of 35 characters in this title make the word "example".

Outbound link: Any link on your page pointing to another site.

So, let's start working on it right away!

Tip 1 - Anchor text
When you create a link to another page or another site of yours, don't just use "click here" or "go" as the anchor text. Basically, don't do this:

To join our online HTML training, < href="001.html">click here< /a>.

Instead, use the keywords related to that page:

Join now our < href="online-html-training.html">online HTML training.

Try also to use these keywords in the name of the HTML file.
Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself. (anchor text)
"click here" is meaningless. But "online HTML training" correspond exactly to your subject, and this specific page, even independantly of its content, will be considered as an interresting page for "online HTML training" by the search engines.

Tip 2 - Backlinks
Spend time to contact other webmasters who have a site about the same subject as yours and exchange text links.
Again, use the keywords that you target in the anchor text of those links. Don't always use the same keywords but sometimes, use synonims and variations.
Only consider a link exchange with sites treating the same subject. Try to get at least 40 backlinks on 40 different websites.

Tip 3 - Pages title
Give a different title to each page, use keywords related to the page.

Tip 4 - Content
Search engines (through their spiders) are indexing text content from your pages. So the first thing you have to do, is make sure you have plenty of text, related to the subject of your web site. The context of the words is also very important, so don't just list hundreds of keywords. Write correct sentences, repeating several times the words you want to focus on. Try to use all the synonyms you know. Eventually, don't correct your typos or mistakes, people will do the same typos when they do a research!

Plus:
Always set the value of the alt="" tag of your images.

< src="html-training.jpg" alt="HTML Training">

Set the description and keywords metas. If possible, write different metas for each page.

< name="description" content="...">
< name="keywords" content="...">


Tip 5 - Content Actualization
You have nice content? Plenty of backlinks and optimized pages? Great, but don't start sleeping on it.
Update your content as often as possible. Add pages, articles, news... Grow your site.

Tip 6 - Web Hosting
Make sure your site loads fast and your hosting is good. A slow web site is no good.

Tip 7 - Clean HTML code
Try to have your HTML code as clean as possible. And try to reduce it a maximum. You should have a lot of text content and a bit of HTML code, not the contrary.

Tip 8 - Directories
Do not forget to post your web site to all the Internet directories related to your subject. These links are better than links exchanges as usually, directories do not require a link back to their site. These one-way links have a very good value for search engines.
Also submit it to DMOZ directory. It will probably take a few months to get your sited indexed, but the backlinks you will get there are worth gold.

Tip 9 - HTML tags H1, H2, B, U...
Use the headers tags for your titles and subtitles, search engine will give more importance to those texts.

<>HTML Training< /h1>

The look of these tags is not so nice but you can use CSS to redefine it.

h1 { color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px }


Tip 10 - Domain name
The keywords used in the domain name have great importance for some search engines, such as Google. If possible, register a domain name with your target keywords.

A domain name like http://www.buy-flowers.com has good chances to get ranked well on "buy flowers" with a bit of SEO and appropriate content.

You can also try subdomains for your most important sections. Subdomains will usually get indexed much faster than the sub-pages and directories.
Taking our example, you could create http://roses.buy-flowers.com, http://tulips.buy-flowers.com, ... generating a kind of "mini-site" for each.

Tip 11 - Inbound/Outbound links
Make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links on your pages. If you have too much outbound links, search engines will devaluate the importance of your page, considering it's just making a gateway to other sites, without having a good value for the surfer.

Tip 12 - Experiment!
Try new things. Play with the keywords density, your site structure, HTML tags and elements.
Some techniques work good with Google, not for Yahoo or MSN and vice-versa. And moreover, the search engine algorithms are changing all the time! Some old strategy might not work anymore but suddenly work great for one of them.

Well, that's it for today! I think that covers most of the SEO Basics you need to know to start optimizing your site. Thrive Learning Institute thanks you for for reading!

Start Small, Dream Big

Its good to be ambitious in business. You're rewarded handsomely for it however you must have the right perspective if you're actually going to realize your ambitions. Thrive Learning Institute provides the experience and knowledge to focus those ambitions into simple, actionable tasks.

When starting an online business its never a good idea to target the broad, general terms like “health care”, or “Beauty”. There's way too much competition and unless you can wait around for 10 years all the while posting amazing content daily you will never get ranked in the search engines. You must start small if you're going to see any degree of success within a reasonable amount of time.

Select a low competition, usually long-tail, keyword phrase within the subject you want your niche in and then work to get to the top of the search engine. The process of getting to the top of the search results is pretty long and involved. Thrive can walk you through the detailed, step by step process of discovering capitalizing on, and ranking first for these keywords.

Once you've achieved the top ranking for your first keyword, choose a related keyword with the same level of competition and difficulty and repeat. Now you have two strong holds in a niche. Keep repeating the process and you'll eventually be able to start competing for those highly competitive keywords. You'll begin to dominate the market and when you dominate a market you have a fat wallet.

An example:

recently, after doing some research, found a potentially profitable keyword, “DJ speakers”. So I decided to throw up a niche site all about how to find the right DJ speakers, with videos and other related material all optimized for DJ speakers. Soon enough I'll be in the top spot when people search for that keyword and I'm already set up to begin optimizing for other keywords with related pages in my site. The next step might be “how to become a DJ” or maybe I'll just expand into the broader “DJ equipment.

So remember start small, be patient and in time you'll get that authority site you've dreamed of. Milk before meat my friends, milk before meat. Thrive Learning Institute will help you get the meat faster:)