SEO is a specialization technique that cannot be learned or fully understood overnight or in a year or two, however, there are some simple techniques you can learn and implement fairly quickly and painlessly.

As a website designer who also performs SEO and marketing for my clients, I encourage them to learn to do things for themselves. I explain, I give examples. Many designers do NOT do this because they feel it’s a form of job security, to keep their clients dependent on them, and charge their clients for every little thing.

I disagree. I want my clients to hire me for what they need, of course. I also want them to grow up to be independent website owners who have the ability to handle and maintain as much as they care to and know they can always retain me again for what they can’t do, or don’t want to do, as well as retain me for an hour or two of consulting and then go run with their own ball. I get more recommendations that way too. Works for me and works for them.

So, let’s learn some simple SEO techniques.

The first one is a very simple one and contributes directly to your website SEO with it’s relevancy to page content. It’s your description meta tag.

Virtually all template based shopping carts and CMS (Content Management Systems) such as Joomla have the built in ability to customize your meta tags on any and every page you like.

Many people spend hours trying to figure out an SEO friendly description tag.

Let’s cut to the chase. Assuming you have decent website content and page copy, use it to your benefit. Simply copy and paste one relevant sentence from each page into that page’s description meta tag. Instant relevancy. No cheating. Happy search engine spiders.

Second is your keyword meta tag. You can use a free tool at submitexpress.com which they call their meta tag analyzer. It will tell you instantly all of your keywords and how many times they appear on any given page.

Once in a while you get some skewed or weird results but 99% of the time this tool is right on the money.

If you don’t for whatever reason find this tool altogether useful, here’s another way to accomplish this. Simply use the words in your store categories which usually run down your left hand menu plus keywords that appear repetitively on your page. When entering them in the keyword meta tag area, don’t use any of the words more than once ~ you should come up with 25 unique keywords.

Next is your page title which can also be used in your title meta tag. This just makes common sense.

Here’s a tip to enhance this whole title business. Again, most template based shopping carts and CMS systems give you an area on each page to input your own HTML.

Before writing your page content, first type a relevant page title. This does not have to be the same as your meta tag title, this is simply a descriptive page “opener” which I am calling a page title. It should of course be relevant to the page content, be keyword rich, and should be constructed to “read right” as opposed to reading like and looking like a bunch of keywords.

The trick here is to format this title NOT in a bold big font but by using the header style tags, which are usually available in a drop down box right above where you are entering the text. Each editor is different but usually you’ll find this right above your box where you are entering your page content.

Type out your page title, highlight it with your mouse, then choose the header tag you want. Be advised that header 1 is enormous and they get progressively smaller down to header 6 which is quite wee. Choosing header 3 or 4 is usually a good way to go. Then go ahead and type your page content. This will show up just as normal text.

Search engine spiders read header tags and utilize the text contained between the opening and closing header tags. They do not read bold or strong tags or font sizes when determining keyword relevancy like they do with header tags. If you view your page in code you will see the header tags look like this ~ an opening tag will look like this <h3> then you’ll see your text and then the closing tag </h3>

Well, there you go. Now get to work on your description, keyword and title meta tags and with properly formatting those page titles with header tags.

You should see better search engine results in 2-3 months if you take the time to be diligent about implementing this. Remember, you only get out of your website what you put into it!

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New Jersey Web Design by Jewelry Collectibles Design, conveniently located in Hackensack, Bergen County New Jersey, is owned and operated by Maureen McCullough. In business since 2000 as a freelance professional and now also an eBay Stores Certified Designer. Our clients receive professional, creative designs put together outside of the typical corporate genre, fully carrying your small business identity through your entire venue ~ website, blog, forum, links management, eBay store and other online venues. Happy to be a woman owned small business.