SEO – Do it or Die in the Search Engines

March 22nd, 2010

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the use of tools and techniques to promote your website and to to help your website get higher page rankings in search engine results page listings (SERPs).

The ultimate aim of any website owner should be to get yourself on the first results page and, better yet, in the top half of the page. This is really the only way that you will generate public visibility of your website’s existence and, as a result, generate more customer traffic – FREE search engine traffic that could lead to a potential increase in income and more business for you.

• A high search engine ranking for your website is extremely essential if you want exposure on the WWW and to do this there is no way you can avoid implementing certain SEO techniques.
• At least 85% of the people who looking for products and services on the Internet will find the relevant website links through search engines results provided by Google, Yahoo or MSN Bing. The whole purpose of optimizing your web pages for high SE rankings is to lure target market customers to your website – potential customers who will be more than likely want to do business with you. The higher up on the search results your website is placed, the more traffic will be directed to your website. That’s essentially what search engine optimization is all about.
• There is a ton of techie information online about how to optimize your website and some can get real complex and need an SEO consultant’s skills. But lets keep it simple – there are things that you can decide or do for yourself. Sometimes even small adjustments will get you improved rankings quite quickly.

Website Content

The first thing that you need to objectively look at is your WEBSITE CONTENT. Search engines generally show websites that contain quality content rather than pretty artistic graphics.

1. The text on your pages must contain the most important keywords i.e. the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site. There is no hard and fast rule about how many words per page – somewhere between 300 – 1,200 words will do.
2. Your content must be written in a natural, “human readable” way and include those important keywords. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this quality text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format – for example a fancy heading that has been created as a graphic will not get “read” by the SE’s.
3. Once you have written your page, you decide on which are the most important keywords. These keywords are then placed in a special (hidden) section of your page and are known as “metatag keywords” (your webmaster will do this). Many search engines will use the meta keywords when indexing your page(s). Others create their index from how often a word is repeated or appears on the page itself. You should never place keywords in your meta area that do not appear on the page itself – this is known as “keyword spamming”.

More about the meta tags section of your web pages.

I know this sounds like something out of the space age, but it is really just simple code. There is much discussion about how effective these meta tags are as only some search engine are reported to use them. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

1. To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the source code. (Did I hear you shout Help!?) To view the source code of any web page do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “page source.” This will open up another window which shows you the underlying programming code that was used to create the page that you are looking at.
2. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the page. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” followed by a list of keywords, separated by commas. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may or may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.
3. Another meta tag to look for is meta name=”description”. This is the overall description of the purpose of your site or a specific page on your site and is used by all Search Engines to display a bit about the page in the search results pages – very important!
4. Another one to look for is meta name=”title”. This is the human-readable title of the page and appears at the very top of the screen in the coloured bar.  Read the next point.
5. The title bar of the page. The title bar is the colored bar right at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your web home page. To increase SERPs, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name. Examine the title bars on all the pages of your website. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. Keep the title short – no more than 6 words or less.

Search Engine and Web Directory Submission

The best advertising and marketing is done by submitting your website to as many search engines and web directories as humanly possible. No amount of press releases, newspaper, banner adverts or email will achieve the same results.

1. Don’t submit websites that are unfinished. When submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, the keywords and any other information that may be relevant, including the name and contact information of your business.
2. However, submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site will be listed immediately or that the ranking will be high – some SEs take months before they index your site because there are thousands of new websites being launched every day. Some of the better engines even review your site by using human editors.
3. One important factor to remember when submitting your website is to include a “site map” of your website (in a special format) which makes the “spidering” easy for the SEs. The larger search engines ignore websites without these special sitemaps.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your website is designed to professional quality using the right keywords, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content.

Inbound Links and popularity

Finally, and becoming more and more important, is the issue of inbound links to your website i.e. what is your “link popularity”. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines now use link popularity to rank your website. It is also based on the quality of the other websites that link to your site.

1. How do you find out who is linking to a page in your website? Go into Google Search and type the of your website as follows (no spaces):    links:www.yourwebsite.xxx
2. All the links that Google (the biggest SE) has pointing back to your site will be displayed (including links on your website pointing to other pages on your website).  In the case that there aren’t many sites linking back to yours, you might consider actively starting an ongoing “linking campaign”.
3. This means that you need to find other complementary websites out there (that are not in direct competition to you) and send a request for a link back to your site.  Most of these sites will be willing to do so, provided that you give them a reciprocal link back to their site. Just make very sure that all the links are appropriate to your site e.g. if you are an architect then find a good garden landscaper website, rubble removal site, etc. to set up links.
4. Should you just get links back from anyone?  Well, that depends – you need to look for professional sites out there (ignore the mickey mouse, badly designed ones that dont have any activity).  Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. (Did I hear you shout Help!?)  This is how you find out the ranking of any site in Google:
5. Go to this website and fill in the details of the website you want to check: http://www.prchecker.info/ You can even check your own page ranking.  Any site which has a ranking higher than your own would be a good choice (don’t really bother with a site with no ranking or lower than your own).

These backlinks from popular, quality sites will not only boost your search engine ranking, but it also direct more good quality traffic to your website.

In Summary

Search engine rankings are an extremely important part of a successful Internet marketing strategy. Don’t ever ignore this important factor in Internet marketing.

Remember, the higher that you rank in search engines for your keywords, the more good, FREE, quality customers will be directed your way.

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Tags: search engine ranking, SEM, SEO, website promotion

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