Way back when people began showing up online the internet was still in its early stages. Getting your site listed well, at first, was a piece of cake, but as more and more sites came around it become more and more difficult to be in the #1 position. Back then there was a lot of experimenting to do in order to get any site listed at all. Optimization was an unknown and no one knew what made the engines tick, or how their algorithms worked. I remember trying things without really having any idea if it would work or not, or if it would really make any difference at all. Over the years there was a lot of experimentation done and the rewards of all this is that today we know what works and what doesn’t and we know exactly what type of changes need to happen to a website in order for it to rise in the listings.

Way back when I started to SEO the term hadn’t even been coined yet. I found that if I added the keyword I wanted to get listed for one more time than the current #1 site I would take over that position. Google wasn’t even around, I imagine the Google gurus were in high school still. Times were exciting and the internet was the new frontier … just waiting to be conquered. Search engines were using the meta tag information to rank sites. So if you had your keyword in your meta keywords tag you would rank for it. Well, actually if your competition used it twice they would rank, so you would want to use it three times. It was really that simple at first. Nothing was impossible, so it seemed, and making money online because a simple task of setting up a site and doing this optimization thing to it.

We learned back then that the title tag was also important and things like this began to be some of the work we always had to do. The meta tags fell to the wayside eventually because it was such an abused system. Search engine algorithms had to become more sophisticated and find some other method to figure out what your site was about, and which out of all the sites was the most important one. To further complicate things the ‘net was growing in leaps and bounds and sites were popping up like kernels of Orville Redenbacher popcorn. There has been no more exciting, captivating and eye opening time of life for me since the sixties, which is when I grew up. Woodstock and everything!

Back when SEO really became a necessity for an online business to succeed at all, the entire process was really just developing. We hadn’t any idea exactly what was going on with the algorithms, except that there were certain things that definitely needed to get done in order to rank well. There was also that far left side, the dark side, where things had to be not done and avoided like the plague. This was a time when SEO people, who were worth their salaries, were in demand and simply had to be used by any serious online business.

Over the past years all of that work that used to be kept secret, or was very complicated and experimental, is now all common knowledge. Along with this new status of SEO as being common knowledge comes the ability to learn how to SEO yourself. You can take a SEO training course, or you can go online and learn it from the many sites that have blogs and forums. Today all of that trial and error, and experimentation of yesteryear, is all set standards and regular procedures.

There are quite a few ways for you to learn SEO today through online tutorials and courses. Be sure to choose a SEO tutorial that will show you the coding changes to make as well as provide information about inbound linking and how to begin generating these valuable backlinks to your site. Today, it’s all a matter of learning what SEO is and then getting the job done … it’s no longer a specialty field that you need to hire a technical guru for. SEO has settled down and become a standard part of web development.

Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service and offers Ethical SEO Training as an affordable introduction to SEO (enough to optimize any website), as well as an Advanced SEO Training Course.

There is nothing more central to any human being than the desire to be entertained. People want to get excited, be tantalized. People want information and to learn and discover and be captivated. The bottom line is that you need to provide something of interest to your readers or they will find that interest elsewhere. This applies to online business as well and in particular any type of content writing including article marketing and on-site content.

When what we want is to have someone read our web page, article or other content, we need to approach people in a way that will indeed captivate them. The title is where you want to get this job done. Use your keywords but do not forget to use words that will make people want to continue reading. Asking a question that begs to be answered is one example. This makes people want to continue reading.

The title tag of a web page is the first spot you need to make this effort. The title tag is often what the search engines use in their results pages, all or at least in part, right from the title tag itself. This is your first line of attack where you want to grab the attention of the reader.

Any title needs to be thought of in this way, not only the title tag on a web page. No matter what you are writing you need to get your readers attention. You want them to continue to read, or even to start to read, whatever it is you have put down into the written word. In article marketing this will be the title of your article. In content on a page it will be the headings and sub-headings of the content. Use the heading tags here, H1 and H2.

There can be a bit of a twist for a web page title. We need to have our keywords in it. We need to engage our readers so that we have their attention too, and that is generally not going to happen by keywords alone. Action words can help and get that person to click. Here are some very important words to use within titles you, results, health, guarantee, discover, love, proven, safety, save and new. Experts say the most important power words are you, free, new and how.

Robert (BK) Kelsey runs Ethical SEO Service where SEO Training is offered both through an Ethical SEO Training Course and an Advanced SEO Training Course. Robert can also SEO your site for you with a typical monthly SEO Campaign.