Top 10 Basic SEO Tips for online success

1) Do Keyword Research : One of the more important SEO activities is proper keyword research. This is important because both the end users and search engines rely on specific keywords to index and find your site. Think very carefully about the main focus of your web site and choose the right keyword and keyword phrases that fit your site and brand. One of the most popular tools to do keyword research with is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool which gives you monthly totals of keywords and keyword phrases on Google.

2) Keyword Density : Use your keywords throughout your web page, but use them normally like you would in conversation. The keyword density needs to be between 2-4%. So for example if you are writing content and there are 800 words then you should not repeat keywords more than 3-4 times for each block of 100 words. If the keyword density of your page is higher than 5% you will get penalized by Google. Also please keep in mind that ultimately you are writing for your readers not search engines, so don't overuse keywords so that it starts to look spammy.

3) Page Titles and Meta Tags : A key element of your on-site SEO are the page title and meta tags. Each page on your site needs to have a unique title tag and have a maximum length of 75 characters. Furthermore the meta description should have a length of 150-160 characters. Search engines read this meta description to understand the overall content of your page.

4)Avoid Duplicate Content : It is a common mistake of many bloggers to go and grab articles from other sites and just repost them to their own sites to get more traffic. What these beginners do not realize is that by posting duplicate content this way they are violating the guidelines of Google and other major search engines. The reasons why duplicate content is a negative thing is it creates negative user experience, affects search engines rankings and brand credibility. So in the end if you want to move up in the search engine rankings, make sure only to use your own unique content.

5) Optimize Images : An important element of on-page SEO is image optimization. Optimize the file size o the image for fast page loads and use keywords in the image ALT tags.

6) Back links for SEO : One of the most important factors to get high rankings on search engines are the quality and quantity of back links. The key here is quality; don't just randomly post links everywhere. Post your links in the appropriate categories in directories, write blogs, articles and utilize social media sites.

7)Create a Sitemap : What is a sitemap? A sitemap is a listing of all of the URLs or pages in your entire website. Search engines can crawl and index your site quicker and easier if you create an XML sitemap.

8) Verify All Links : It is important that you double check all links on your site. If any links are dead or broken then it's both bad for your readers but also for search engines as they can't crawl all your pages.

9) Utilize Robots.txt : The robots.txt is a file uploaded to the root directory of your website. This file gives specific instructions to search engines on which pages can and cannot be crawled. For example is you have a specific login page that you don't want to show up on search engines you can list it in the robots.txt file and it won't get crawled.

10) Tracking with Google Analytics : A final step should be to get Google Analytics in place on your site so that you can track how much traffic you re getting and what keywords are being used to bring in that traffic. You can thus keep track of traffic to each page of the site and use this information to adjust the keywords and keyword density to improve overall SEO.