SEO for Beginners - Page One

Hi! This is my SEO for Beginners Page One. Welcome to all visitors!

First things first. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the art or science of making your blog or website more easily found. There are many pages that offer packages to help you get that coveted "first page" listing and help you find good keywords for your sites.

I want to share with you some secrets of good SEO. Web Page (or blog!) optimization is another term you will hear about. It simply means making your web page more friendly to search engines and more able to be found among the thousands and thousands of other pages out there.

Here are one way to optimize your web page:

Get a free counter - A counter is a tallying program that people can choose to put on the bottom of their web pages. A counter tells you how many people are on your site each day. Some companies can tell you exactly where each computer is that comes to your page, when the busiest time of day is for your page, and much more.

This can be fun to find out, and kind of addicting. I remember how thrilled I was when I found out that people were coming from other countries to see my website. And, best of all, you don't need to spend money in order to put these programs on your website.When you go to a site to get a free counter, the site will have instructions telling you how to download their free files.

Here are some great sites that offer counters:

Bravenet not only has great counters (customizable, too) but has other totally free services that webmasters can use to make their web pages spiffier. They have free forms, chat rooms, templates, and a lot more. They offer their services (as most sites do) to webmasters.

The Sitemeter site pages can give even more information about your site visitors. I decided to put both of these kinds of counters on my pages. Unfortunately, both services have limits as to how many pages you can put counters on. You can pay to be able to count everyone on every page, all the time. Maybe I will do this someday.

More about being a webmaster: Don't worry if you are just a beginner at "webmastering." If you have a web page, you already are a webmaster, because you are in charge of that page. If you are a blogger, you are also in charge of your blog. Don't be afraid to read up on SEO, and try one thing at a time. You don't have to pay a service to do this, BUT you can if you want.

Bravenet and the other services on this page make it their job to explain their services, and that makes things a lot easier. I feel that I can help others save a lot of time finding information through these links and sites. I can't wait to explore each site even more. Let me know what you think about the sites, and please email me with others you like. Find these useful sites at the bottom of this page AND on my page SEO for Beginners Page Two.

Other things you can do to make your site more search engine friendly is to write interesting copy, provide quality links for your readers, and use social networking to connect with your customers or readers.

More things you can do is use good keywords, research your keywords, use head tags, list your site on high-ranking websites, and get lots of backlinks (links to YOUR site from other places.) It is not good to pay for these; you will naturally get backlinks from people that like your site or articles.

So... it's a process. I am learning about SEO more all the time. Here are some great sites to help you learn about Search Engine Optimization.

Try these out and let me know which ones you think are best. If you find one you don't like, or a site does not go to a good SEO site, let me know and I'll take it off.

All these sites are FREE and/or have FREE sections on each site.

If you haven't been there yet, be sure to check the Betsyanne SEO for Beginners - Page Two.

Want to learn more? Visit the Betsyanne Learn More about SEO page.

Thanks for visiting!