Search Engine Optimization: Get Your Site Noticed For The Right Reasons
Type something related to your business into Google. Anything. Now look under the Search box at the number of results that are returned. That’s what you are up against when a potential customer starts looking for your company’s products and services.
The solution is SEO. Short for search engine optimization. This uses a combination of techniques to make your site easier for search engines to index while proving to them that your site has relevant enough content to rank highly in search results.
Keep it simple
All of the experts we talked to agreed that the main thing Web developers should focus on in terms of SEO is making the site SEO is making the site easy for search engine robots to navigate, called crawl ability. Far too often, we use technologies, internal link structures, and other hurdles that do not allow the search robots from Bing, Baidu, Google, etc., to index our sites completely and accurately” says Avinash Kaushik, co-foununder of ketmotive (www. Marketmotive.com) and analytics analyst for Google. When Creating or outsourcing a Web site, be sure to keep your site’s structure as clean and weel-labeled as possible. Give each page YRL a meaningful name, Don’t include stray pages that aren’t connected to a parent page, and label all images and viveo with descriptive captions that the search engine robots can read (images and video are invisible to them).\Many Web site creation tools have plug-ins or other tools that simplify SEO. For example, if you use the popular WordPress site creation software (free;www.wordpress.org),you can install tools such as the All In SEO Fack(free;tinyurl.com/6ljwp) to easily handle many SEO related chores.All Web site operators should also sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (free; http://www.google .com/webmaster/tools),which provide a wealth of SEO-related info.
Keywords Are Key
The goal of a search engine is to provide results that are as relevant as possible to the search terms entered. As a business owner, that means it is your job to anticipate what search engine sees that your site contains keywords that match up perfectly with search terms, it will sense a good match exists between uyour site and the searcher and raise your site’s ranking on the search results list accordingly.
There’s no magic formula for coming up with good keywords, other than putting yourself in customer’s shoes and thinking about what items or benefits they seek that your business can supply. Keywords should be as specific as possible; focus on two- or three-word phrases that define your business.
Another tip is to cheek competitors’ web sites to see what keywords they use. Load up any page in Internet Explorer, right-click it and click view source .In Firefox, right-click a web page and click view page source. Look at the <title>, meta name= “description,” and meta name = “keywords” tags (discussed later) to see if you find anything useful.
Content is King
Once you’ve come up with a killer set of keywords, the temptation to pack them all into every page of your web site is great, but that strategy is bound to backfire. Search engines are good at evaluating the importance of keywords, and using keywords over and over again raises a red flag to the search algorithm. As a rule of thumb, if your content reads well to a human, it will rank higher in the search results.
Meta Keywords
Once upon a time, the meta name= “keywords” section of a web page was used to place descriptive terms about the site’s content that a search engine could use to categorize and help rank a site for relevance. Than unscrupulous the feature, packing the section with so many keywords that the entire section became worthless for search engine ranking. “The meta keywords feature does nothing”, says Eric Enge, president of stone Temple Consulting (www.stonetemple.com) and co-author of “The Art of SEO” “Don’t pay any attention to [the meta keywords feature], or if you insist on paying attention to it, spend 15 seconds and put in a couple words related to the page .”
Title Tags
The <title>tag has a dramatic impact on search rankings. “You want to take the major keyword that relates to each page and make sure it’s right at the very start of the title tag”, says Enge. “If you want to put your company name or your name or whatever it is in there, do that at the end rather than at the beginning.” search algorithms at the beginning of a sentence as having more importance than the information at the end so instead of using a title tag such as “XYZ Inc. Widgets” use “Widgets at XYZ Inc.”
Many times, site visitors come in from the “sides” of the instead of through the home page so be sure to create unique title tags for every single page. “You should never duplicate a title tag”, says Enge. “Even if the differences between the pages are small, you should highlight what those differences are.”
Meta Description
This area of the page contains a brief overview of your site –just a sentence or two. It shows up only for search engines crawling your site, visitors don’t see the text. “It doesn’t affect ranking”, says Enge, “but it’s very useful, because when the search engine shows your page in the results it picks the description from somewhere. It becomes a chance for you to sell the content of your page”. Often the text you see in an automatically generated search result comes directly from the site’s meta description so be sure to put a succinct advertising message there that will draw people’s attention to your entry and make them click it.
Forging Links
Arguably the most important optimization of all and unfortunately the one you have the least control over is building a link network buy getting other sites to provide links back to your site “The links are the critical part” says Enge. “They’re like votes in an election, essentially “Unlike an election however not all links are created equal. One link might be worth up to 100,000 times more than another”.
Separating the good links from the bad is easy. Ones again put yourself in the shoes of potential customers. Do you think they’ll care more about a link to your site from a respected reviewer or one in the comments section of a blog that was obviously planted there by one of your employees? Links, like people have variable amounts of credibility and both customers and search engines weigh that credibility heavily when determining the relevance of your web site.
The best way to generate valuable links is to crate unique, fresh content that other people want to read and quote .You can also send product samples or offer free registrations to established bloggers for review or write for trade publications or blogs that will link to your site at the end of your articles.
Going local also helps contact relevant local businesses and organizations such as the chamber of commerce to see if it’s interested in doing a link swap (you link to them and they link to you), but don’t make the common mistake of taking this too far. If search engines see you’re swapping links with everyone on the planet, your search rankings will suffer.
Stay Informed
Because SEO is a moving target it pays to keep up with the latest trends and update your website accordingly. Be sure to read the resources listed in the “SEO Library” sidebar frequently for the latest news and tips. That said never lose sight of the fact that content is king. “What does not change over time is having great relevant content on your site having clean URL structures ensuring all the tags are in place creating useful navigation elements writing lots of new and great content in the language of users linking to other valuable sources (as sensible) and getting links from other valuable sources (as relevant)”, says Kaushik. “So focus on that let the search engines do what they do best”.
SE OPTIMER 