by Recycled Traffic Inc

In the past 3 years that we've been operating this site, we've been in contact with thousands of webmasters. Much to our surprise, most webmasters really don't know how to properly optimize a website for high visibility in the search engines.

People are still caught up on "meta-tags" and "submission software". If any company tries to solicit your business by offering to submit your site to thousands of search engines every month for a year, or any variation of this banter... run!!

In this day and age submitting your site to a search engine for inclusion is just not necessary. With the exception of a few worthwhile directories like Dmoz or Jayde, the search engines will find you by following links from other websites. So in essence, if you work on building your link popularity, you are submitting to the search engines.

Now, by no means do I classify myself as an SEO expert. Rather, someone who has achieved very good rankings in the search engines by following some basic principles:

If your main keyword is "pink widgets" then, if at all possible, your domain should be pinkwidgets.com or a similar variation. I believe this is the single most important thing when it comes to SEO. You will have to work that much less to get to the top.

Optimizing your pages- This is not rocket science.

Your pages should be set up like this:

-URL- If it's a sub page, make sure the url has the keyword in it. for instance, www.yourdomain.com/my-keywords.html

-Page title- make sure the keywords you are targeting are here, but do not overstuff. Put the keywords first, then the domain name. If you have a very brandable domain, then it may make sense to put the domain first.

-H1 tags- Insert your keywords here, as this is what the page should be about.

- Meta data- this is still debatable whether any search engines still look at this. But, it can't hurt. So, make sure the description tag is relevant to your page content, a synopsis, if you will.

-Body- Write "unique" copy that flows nicely and contains your keywords. Write naturally as you would speak to someone on the phone describing your products or services. Don't be overzealous to mention your keyword in every sentence, as this is spammy and could get you penalized.

Once you have your pages set up correctly, you can focus on building link popularity. What is "link popularity"? The number of inbound links pointing to your site. Think of it as this, the more paths to your site, the better chance someone has to find you, including the search engines. This is, and always will be, the number one online marketing technique for long term results in my opinion.

To get a good indication of how competitive your keywords are just do a search and see how many results are found. If you have 10,000,000 or more other pages to compete against this would be considered "highly competitive". Also, check Overtures view bids tool to see what advertisers are paying per click. If people are paying 3 dollars or more per click, well, you better be patient in your SEO endeavors because it could take a year or more to accumulate enough links. Here is another very good tool to see exactly what people are searching for and how many times per day they search for it http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Depending on the competitiveness of your keywords, this will determine how many links you will need. If you're targeting "black widgets" for a specific page on your site, the anchor text of the inbound link should be... you guessed it, "black widgets". This is how search engines recognize the theme of your page, in addition to the on-page elements.

A perfect example of this theory can be found when searching for "computers". You will find Apple at the top, without even mentioning the word "computers" in the title, URL, or homepage, even once. But search engines know this is the most relevant site for "computers" because so many links pointing to apple.com have "computers" in the link text.

As I mentioned in the beginning, this is a crash course in search engine marketing, optimization and placement... or whatever you'd like to call it. The name of the game is getting to the top of the "big 3": Google, Yahoo and MSN for your most effective and highest converting keywords.

The best places to start if you're wanting to learn SEO are the forums. There is a wealth of information and resources in forums and lots of people willing to answer any questions you might have.

Here is a list of our favorite forums to check out:

http://www.v7n.com/forums/index.php

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/

http://forums.seochat.com/

http://www.seo-guy.com/forum/

Start pouring over the info on these sites and you'll be on your way to the top in no time.