SEO’S LEARNING CURVE.     Do you jump into search engine optimization all of a sudden just because you read on some blogs about the ‘secrets’ of how to get the most out of it? Like anything that requires some knowledge and understanding, there’s a learning curve to follow before you can truly comprehend the art of search engine optimization.

Yes, search engine optimization can be considered an art form – just like writing an article, painting a portrait, taking a photograph and so on. As a webmaster, I’m sure you want good results coming out of your endeavor, and in SEO, you want to see your site gain traffic and ranking by doing things the right way. In the following article by Robert D.Kelsey, he explains the do’s and don’ts of SEO which will give you food for thoughts.

Search Engine Optimization is an Art Form

Getting your site optimized is the first thing you should endeavor to do once you have your site built and online. I would suggest learning about SEO before you jump in and start making changes. It’s a progression of code and content changes that you should do in a certain way to ensure that the engines will actually like, and respond by ranking you better.

I have seen many people make the mistake of jumping into SEO without having the knowledge to really make the correct changes to their site. These people inevitably load their pages with keywords and do a lot of things that are just going to hurt your ranking, or the ability of your site to ever be ranked.

There is a difference between using a keyword five times on a page, and 50 times. The engines want to find sites that appear natural, and if you ask me, do not appear to have been optimized! This is very important, and a lot more important than most people ever will realize. The sites that seem to rank the best are those that do not appear to be excessively optimized, and have lots and lots of inbound links using many different keyword combinations for anchor text … yes, even “Click Here”.

Optimization is something that really needs to be studied, and learned about. You cannot just jump in and all of the sudden know how to optimize a website. It is a lot of common sense, yes indeed, but it is certain knowledge of exactly what to do that will make all of the difference to the final product, and your rankings on the search engines.

Let’s face it, without listings “above the fold”, (visible without scrolling) on the first page at Google, you are just not going to get many visitors. You need to get your site into these top positions in order to make any real advancement in your online marketing.

So you need to work on all of the different parts of any given web page that will make it conform closely to the search engines algorithms, well for Google, MSN and Yahoo! anyway. They are the three big engines that will generate 99+% of all the traffic you will get from the organic search engine listings.

The main items that you will want to work on to get optimized are the title tag, the meta description tag, the meta keywords tag, code attributes like alt=, title=, summary=, H1 and H2 tags, and possibly the H3 tag, keyword density, navigation and/or ease of navigation and anchor text and internal linking are all among the main things to work on for on-site optimization.

About the author: Robert ‘BK’ Kelsey provides a Connecticut SEO via his Ethical SEO Service from Hamden, CT. Ethical SEO Service uses only white hat, or more precisely, “ethical” means of optimizing your website. We maintain that content is your King and inbound links are your Queen. We strive to make your site the authority in your market.