Webmasters, site owners, and online marketers have these basic SEO techniques down pat. Here are the top basic techniques necessary in optimizing your website:

1. Keywords

Keywords are basically at the heart of search engines. To be on the top results of the search engines. You have to optimize on your keywords and keyword phrases. So make sure you’ve placed your keywords on the titles of every page of your site. Your main keywords should also be plaed on your Meta Tags on your pages. You can also put the keywords on the top and bottom portions of your pages, like putting it in the the first and last paragraphs of your text content.

It also helps when you determine what other keywords the search engines could have associated with your own keywords.Looking into the competing sites that also use your keywords is important. You can find the other sites with your keywords in the titles by using the allintitle command in Google (e.g. “allintitle:yourkeyword”).

2. Meta Tags, Title Tags, and Anchor Tags

You should have Meta Tags on each of your pages. As stated on number 1, it should also contain your keywords. Just remember not to repeat them; it”ll be like spamming that way. Be careful in writing your Meta Description because it will show up in the search engines.

The Title Tag should also contain your main keywords. It should be 63 charcters or less for it to appear in full in Google. The Title Tag is critical for on-page optimization and can help the search engine crawlers on your site.

The Anchor Tag, or the URL, should contain your title or the main keywords from your page title. The anchor text is also widely used. It combines your keywords in a clickable form and your site URL.

3. Link building

Building quality links is essential if you want to generate more traffic and be on the top pages of search results. The search engines use backlinks as a vote for your website and send their crawlers to determine your standing in the search engines. Start by submitting your site to the search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and to directories.

4. Indexed Pages

Knowing which of your pages have been indexed by the search engines is also valuable information. This is important for you because with this you will be able to determine what else to improve on your site and what else to offer to the online community.

You can also check to see your links that are displayed. Check if you have any titles or descriptions missing from your pages, and improve on them.

5. Blog Posts, Article, and Press Releases

Written works are also great generators of traffic and backlinks. Make a blog that encourages comments form readers and visitors. This blog should be updated daily or weekly. Articles should be submitted to ezines and article directories for more exposure and readability. Press releases should also be sent out on the Web with your site URL and contact details.

6. Social Networks

Social networking is also a big boost to your site’s traffic and availability. Social sites like Digg and StumbleUpon also help in optimizing your articles, posts, and site. Other social sites assist in promoting your products and services, like myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

There are a lot more SEO techniques out there, some are growing in usage and some are still being developed. Email marketing is now one of the most used marketing strategies, for example. Other resort to consistently keeping up with basic SEO techniques and interacting with the online community through social networks.

Stepping out of the SEO sphere in particular and getting into internet marketing in general, here’s a video explaining the three methods of marketing your website online: (1.) SEO, (2.) Meta Tags, and (3.) Submissions and promoting content.

Everyone tinkering with the Internet will eventually be learning about HTML, especially the basics of it. Here’s a video showing and explaining how to do simple and basic HTML.

Other than the site content and link quality, search engine crawlers also look into the HTML of a site. When it comes to the structure, the engines like the sites search-friendly. Now most of us don’t really like dealing with HTML. But it will help improve the development of your site. It certainly can’t hurt to learn at least the basic HTML guidelines for SEO. With this, there are certain things to be done and certain things to avoid.

1. Look over your page and check that at it a well-formed HTML or XHTML page. By well-formed, we mean that it meets the W3C standards. You can use the W3C validator tool or the SEO Worker validator for this.

2. Control the size of your page, not too small nor to big (not less than 5K nor more than 15K).

3. Check the page loading time of each page. Make sure that important ones (if not all) load fast. Restrict the loading time to a maximum of 8 seconds.

4. Don’t stuff a page with several links. Keep it to less than a hundred.

5. Keywords are still key. Use your keyword or keyword phrase in the site navigation structure.

6. Don’t forget the title tag! It’s one of the most important SEO techniques. Your title tag for each page should be composed of the strongest keyword or keyword phrase that best describes the page. As much as possible, choose keywords or phrases that should be a part of the page title.

7. Meta tags are also important for better SEO. The Author Meta Tag can help in getting your name or the name of your company in the top spot of search results.

The Description Meta Tag is used to describe the page; it doesn’t really do much to improve the page ranking.

The Keywords Meta Tag can help the search engines in organizing the page and site so that a visitor can easily find it. There are search engines that put a limit to the number of keywords that meta tags allow, so the use of quality keywords or keyword phrases is encouraged.

Robots Meta Tags is used to indicate to the robots visiting the page if it can be indexed. Not all robots follow this anymore though.

8. The heading tag also contributes to better SEO when relevant keywords or keyword phrases are used. As much as possible, keep the usage of the h1 tag to one per page.

9. In using ALT tags, it better not to use it too much because your site could drop from the search results. This tag is better used when linking to an image.

10. In using images, be careful to add the keyword or keyword phrase as part of the image filename. If this is not possible, then put the keywords outside the images or within the ALT tags.

11. Use keywords or keyword phrases as anchor text when linking, especially when linking your page internally.

12. Links that are related to your page or site are rated higher by the search engines. So choose only relevant links to have a positive impact on the search engines.

13. Adding bookmarking icons on your page can help with generating traffic on your page or site. Users and visitors will be able to bookmark your pages and spread word across the Web because of these icons.

14. Selected keywords or keyword phrases should be used throughout the page. It specifically should be in the first few sentences and in the last one, in the title tag, in the heading tag, and once in bold text.

15. It is better to have your links and primary content near or at the center of the page, as this will be more relevant than having them at the corner of the page.

There are many more pointers for HTML guidelines that can help with SEO. For more information and more tips, go to SEO/SEM Journal.

Meta tags are considered by many to be the most important element of your page. Find ut how to edit them and make them more significant to search engine crawlers with this tutorial from TechSavvyMarketer.com.

A tag is defined as a relevant keyword or term used to describe or associate with an article, picture, or video clip. The purpose of every tag is to classify the article, picture, or video and help visitors and users find information in the same category. In a way, a tag works like a keyword or a category label.

Tags are very prevalent in blogs and social sites for this purpose. They can be displayed as navigation in what is commonly called a tag cloud. Tag clouds display each tag or keyword in different font sizes. This difference in font sizes implies the number of times the keyword or tag has been used. Tags that are used many times are larger than those not often used.

Clicking on a tag will lead a visitor onto a page where associated information is shown for the visitor to choose from. Usually, it is the most recent associated articles, pictures, or videos that are shown. Other social sites, however, opt to show information that are more relevant than the others first (e.g. Youtube).

Tags also come with their “related tags.” A tag is always shown with another tag that is related to it to give the visitors more options on what to search for.

Tagging For SEO

Tagging is not only useful for visitors. It is also used in search engine optimization.

Tagging allows a user to bring in more link flows to your site. The presence of tags and a tag cloud is very effective in terms of search engine optimization. This is because these tags are textual and keyword-rich. It brings in more structure to the keyword links in your site.

Through this, tagging can significantly increase a website’s traffic. Through the tags it can achieve visibility in a vast array of search terms. Choosing a relevant keyword as a tag for your content and it will gain you instant rankings.

Tag conjunction pages can also add some traffic to your site. Tag conjunction pages are automatically made when there are multiple posts with two tags in common. In displaying the links that are not just connected to the related tag pages but will also lead to conjunctions between related tags, more pages are shown to the search engine crawlers.

When Visitors Do the Tagging…

There are sites that allow tagging to be done by visitors. Social networking and bookmarking sites are the leaders in this category. While this is a good thing for the visitors, it may not always be a good thing for your site. Some disadvantages of having visitors do the tagging are the following:

Visitors sometimes use tags that only have relevance to themselves and not to other visitors. For example, a visitor puts in a tag “john’s party.” Obviously, this is only for the tagger’s use and not for anyone else’s.

The tags become inconsistent. They are misspelled, others have hyphens, and there are visitors who would tag a rather obscure synonym.

The visitors may not know how to choose the right keywords to tag.

There are sites, however, that still rises in the ranks even when it is the visitors who do the ranking. Amazon.com is a great example for this. This is because, despite the disadvantages, tagging still presents itself as a useful and competitive tool for both the users and search engine optimization.