THE FIRST, MOST IMPORTANT THING

Hello everybody!

I would like to start out this SEO adventure with the most important starting subject in SEO....KEYWORDS! So, you have a great idea and you want to get indexed by Google so people will come to see your idea...you need keywords!

The best way for me to do this was to make a list of all pertinent subjects to home security. I started out security, home security, security systems, ADT, etc....until I had a huge list. Then I investigated each keyword to see if people actually searched for this word. Some great tools for this include Google's keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), Wordtracker (http://www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com/) and Overture (http://www.inventory.overture.com/). All of these would be great tools for you to use! The most important thing with keywords though is to pick something that is searched for but that is unique, meaning there are not 5 bajillion searches for your word. If you go that route, you may never see your site ranking in Google at all because of how competitive it can get. Google's keyword tool is great for checking how competitive a keyword is..

Once you choose some keywords that describe your site, I would suggest you start with one keyword per page to make things simpler. In order for the search engine to know what keyword belongs to what page you will need to place a small HTML tag after the tag and before the head tag. So go to the page's HTML, and place this code, substituting the appropriate keyword:

meta name="keywords" content="your keyword"

(Don't forget to open and close the phrase with brackets < > )

Doing this will be like shouting to search engines that your site is about such and such subject. You may also at this time want to create a description about your site, so make up a great description that tells what your page is about, but also attracts readers. If you look at Google, the description is what appears beneath the site name, so it is an important subject. When making a description, it is also good practice to place your newly-selected keyword toward the front of the description if possible. However, avoid over-stuffing your description tag with your keyword because Google thinks of this as spam. When you have a description prepared place this tag by your other keywords tag you just put in:

meta name="description" content="your description"

For your own knowledge, a meta tag basically is a hidden indication to a search engine to describe additional information about your page. Just as an example, I will post what I have put for my site:

!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
head>
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
title>SECURE 24 SEVEN | Authorized ADT Dealer | ADT Washington DC
meta name="description" content="ADT Home Security Washington DC | Receive a free ADT-monitored home security system when you set up a monthly monitoring agreement | Authorized ADT dealer| Secure24Seven" />
meta name="keywords" content="ADT home security Washington DC" />
meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/default.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection, handheld" title="Default" />
link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/print.css" type="text/css" media="print" title="Default" />


You may also notice the little "robots" meta tag. This is a good practice to get into for your pages since it is almost like you are inviting the little search engine bot over for search engine tea and crumpets...

I hope this helps clear up some of the mystery with keywords, it is an ongoing subject of interest, so I will make other posts when I have some more time... See ya

G2