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There are many services out there that will promise you the world when it comes to SEO and many of them will fail to live up to the promises that they have laid out for you in there sales letter. I am going to give you a quick look at the 5 most important things that I have come across in terms of SEO.

1. Above all other things that will make or break your site jumping into the first page of the organic rankings is the keyword in which you are after. Before you even begin to design your site you must first know which keyword or phrase that you are going to try and rank for. Along with your one main keyword or keyword phrase you are going to want to pick about 3-4 other keywords related to your target keyword.

2. Make sure your page is related to your keywords and they are not forced into the content a ridiculous amount of times to try and yell at the spider. This might get you initial traffic but your readers will be turned off by this since your website is obviously designed for Google and not for your audience.

So when writing content for your website it is important that you write for the user with SEO keywords in mind and not for the search engine with the user as an after thought. Through personal experience i have seen often times pages with better content rank higher than sites that focus exclusively on the keywords

3. It is important that your primary keyword phrase appears inside of your H1 tag and your meta tag. While including the keyword in the Meta tag make sure to also accurately describe what information is on the site.

4. Have the linking around your site done in anchor text that describes your keywords instead of “click here” or something else that has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Google looks at this anchor text so why not place some of your keywords there. It is also a good practice to use this strategy while interlinking the pages within your domain.

5. The last tip is to make sure that your site is easy to use and navigate. Sure it might look cool to see all these pictures and ads everywhere as soon as someone gets to your page, but it can often be overwhelming to the visitor and they will not even know where to start.

A simple page with a good size font so it is easy for the reader to read goes a lot further with your customers than you would imagine. Especially since for some reason the majority of internet users are still using Dial up or some other slow connection so if your page is filled with all kinds of images and movies and moving parts it may time out while it tries to load or your potential customer could give up and move on to the next site.

One question I often hear asked by people wanting to get an IT job is “how much will I earn if I get certification X”, another is “What type of job can I get with certification X”.

They are under the belief that achieving one of these certifications will get them a particular job role, or an increase in salary. Many assume that if they can pass an MCSA then they will be able to walk in to systems administrator role, or if they get a CCNA they will be able to easily get a role as a Cisco network admin. If these people have the necessary experience to backup these qualifications then I wish them all the best. However the people who usually ask these questions are the ones with no experience.

Quite often you will see adverts from training providers offering a training course for people wanting to get into IT with the promise of a £30K+ at the end of it. The sad truth is that unless you are extremely lucky the chances of this happening are very slim.

There are also instance of people cheating to get these certifications using “brain dumps”, this is where people get hold of copies of the actual test questions and answers. This allows them to memorise the correct answers to pass the test. These people would quickly be found out in a job scenario and promptly fired.

Certification should not be perceived as a method to get a job, it should be used as method to validate existing experience. Interviewers will quickly be able to see whether you have the experience required for a role, and if you have the necessary knowledge to go with your qualifications.

Using certification to validate your existing experience and skills will certainly help when applying for a new role as the potential employer will be able to look at these certifications along with your previous job history to get a better picture of your talents.

I will cover the subject of how to best get your first job in IT in a future article.