by Jessica Bosari

Created on: April 21, 2009   Last Updated: June 13, 2009

Getting started in an online home business has quite a learning curve. It will often take you months to see any traffic worth telling Mom about. While it is true that the content on your site is one of the most important factors in your success, no one will find your content if you do not give your site a quick SEO facelift.

SEO Basics

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. An SEO facelift involves ensuring that the right keywords are in your header metadata, ensuring the search engines can find you. This will make your site more likely to turn up in organic searches and can increase your web traffic ten-fold in just a few days.

Metadata

Metadata sounds like some futuristic space age term, but it really just means keywords placed so that users cannot seem them, but search engines can. There are a few important facts you need to know about metadata to use them effectively.

Search engines list your site when they find relevant keywords in your metadata that are also found in your content. If your metadata does not match the content, Google sees the content as less relevant to a given search, putting you lower down the list.

Code for Including Metadata

The following is an example of the hmtl coding that should be in your index.php file. This should appear near the top before your first item tag:

<title>Jessica Bosari, Writer</title>
<meta name="description" content="Quality Content at Affordable Rates" />
<meta name="keywords" content="freelance writer, articles, marketing articles, internet marketing, seo, content, online marketing" />
<meta name="author" content="jbosari" />
<meta name="revisit-after" content="1" />

Where to Put the Code

By placing the metadata near the top of your index page, you make it easy for the search engine to find out what your site is about. When the same keywords also appear in your content, it is matched by the search engine and gives you a higher rank in relevancy. Be careful not to over do it, though. Search engines see the overuse of keywords as spam, so just mention the keyword at least once in a title (titles are given more weight) and about three times in your content.

Keyword Research

It is also important to be sure your page navigation has relevant keywords. When choosing the right keywords, you should use Google's Keyword tool at Adsense to compare the words that generate the most traffic and have less market saturation. This way, you are not competing with the big, already established sites and have a better chance of a good ranking.

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