What are tips to help my website come up in the first few pages of a search engine?

[blacksmith]

my website is creativeforgings.net , I have heard about optimizing?, but I dont know what all this stuff means, I am a blacksmith artist not a website specialist and it seems like every time I pay to get stuff done....I feel like I being robbed!

[BizSharing]

Well you should know by now that internet is all about content whether it is video, audio, images or articles. And most often all of these contents are usually found thru search engines like google, yahoo and msn.

Anyhow search engine cannot interpret content and evaluate how useful it is without some kind of info about what is all about. So search engine needs input to understand that and very likely that input are in written text. If it is a video, audio or images, some kind of description are needed for that content.

Optimized content is about letting know the search engine what that content really is and how many people think that the content is really what is all about. This is judged by SE by description of the page where the content is and link with 'anchor text' that point to the content. This link is also called backlink in SEO terms.

I look at your site and your testimonial pages and I gather you know your stuff really well and want to share your knowledge. But it seems to me you have difficulty in web development. I can understand that. Anyhow if you need some kind of success on the net, presentation of your content is very important. Good presentation can lead to trust and credibility.

I know a bit about SEO and web development and how to perform better at the search engine but to tell you the truth you need investment to achieve it because all this knowledge and tools are very valuable. And you need experience to know where to get the better deals for your money.

I'm thinking about getting into web consulting in small portion of my full time online. I will give free consultation if you invest in my recommendation. But you don't have to commit right away. I will give you the free resources for you to understand the concept. If you interested you can contact me thru my profile. All the best.

[webwisewords]

At its most basic, the steps for SEO are:

1) Keyword research - find relevant keywords for your site and those that will create targeted traffic. A good mix of competitive and niche keywords will help you short and long term.

2) Accessibility - make sure your site is accessible. Good navigation is essential to ensure search engines can index every page and also to ensure visitors can navigate properly to relevant pages.

3) On page optimisation - content needs to include the main keywords for that page, as well as topically or semantically related keywords. Alt tags, Title tags, and description tags can also include keywords but not unnecessarily.

4) Off page optimisation - essentially, this means building links (HTML links with relevant keywords used as anchor text) for each of your pages and it needs to be an ongoing process. Link building can be done through a combination of techniques like social media marketing, article marketing, and directory submissions.

5) Be ethical - don't use black hat (unethical) methods or you face the very real risk of seeing your pages and site being penalised by the search engines.

6) Keep it up - SEO is not short term and you shouldn't expect immediate results. Keep up the hard work, add new content, develop new links. Begin again and again.