Important Steps for Optimizing your Website for Search Engines
The five steps described below will give you an idea about how to optimize a website to perform better in major search engines. If you followed these steps properly within few days you will notice your website search engine position has significantly improved depending on you industry competition.
Step 1 - Keyword selection
Step 2 - Creating optimized content
Step 3 - Site structure
Step 4 - Internal linking
Step 5 Link building
Step 1 - Keyword Selection
Selecting keyword is a single most important factor in the entire search engine optimization process. Choosing the right and relevant keywords will not only help you in getting good search engine position and targeted traffic to your website but it will also increase your return on investment (ROI) quite significantly.
Example: If you are a company based in USA providing search engine optimization (SEO) services. The first keyword you consider would be definitely
Keyword Competition
SEO : 73,000,000
Search engine optimization : 63,600,000
SEO Company : 26,800,000
It is possible to get good ranking on these keywords but it will take lot of time and money instead you can target "SEO Company USA or search engine optimization company USA in this way you are targeting two keyword at a time with less competition that means chances of ranking your website is quite high along with targeted traffic.
Keyword selection and research tools
1. Yahoo overture: The yahoo overture search term suggestion tool will help you quite a lot in finding the keywords which are more relevant to your website so that you can concentrate more on those keywords in order to achieve more targeted visitors to your website http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
2. Word Tracker: Word tracker is also another website which functions more like that of yahoo overture http://www.wordtracker.com/
Step 2 - Creating optimized content
In the recent past there has been lot of changes in the search engine algorithms but there is no change in the importance given to quality and unique content. This step will show you how to create optimized and unique content for high search engine position.
Unique and well written content always has a tendency to grab visitor's attention and it will also make you visitors satisfied by giving them the thing for what they are looking for through your website, so create a content keeping in mind what your visitors are looking for along with the targeted keywords.
Before you create content first ask yourself some questions:
What services you offer
Do you provide the services that your visitors are looking for
Content optimization
Four important factors for optimizing content
1. Heading tags - ( to )
2. Special text - (bold etc.)
3. Inline text links - (anchor text and alt tags for images )
4. Keyword density - (number of occurrences of your targeted keywords in a page)
Heading Tags
By default text in these tags appear too large than standard text in a browser. We can customize it by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Tip: Do not use the same tag more then once on a page.
Special Text
It can be used in bold, colored, "In quotes" or (in brackets). Using special text will help draw the attention to important information and also add weight to your keywords.
Inline Text Links
Example: We provide SEO services and web hosting.
You add a link to related page on your website to these bold words. It gives the reader a way to find the information you are referring to.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the number of occurrences of targeted keyword in the content of the page. You should not spam the targeted keyword in your content; recommended keyword density is between 4% to 10%.
Step 3 - Site Structure
You must structure your website to attract the visitor as well as the search engine spiders. The site structure will help the search engine spiders to read your website. Keep the code as clean as possible so search engine spider can get to your content, where you want them to be.
Use CSS to cut down code, extra code like for font style, tables, images etc...
Things to remember while planning site structure
Keep URL short and close to root of the website
While creating folder and files use keyword
E.g.: for a page in web hosting packs www.domainname.com/web-hosting/website-hosting.html
Use Hyphens (-) while splitting name in to 2 instead of underscore (_) as shown in above example.
Step 4 - Internal Linking
Internal linking means linking to your pages within the website by way of sitemap, navigation bar, footer, header etc. The sitemap should be linked on all pages of your website to get spider by search engines from anywhere. You should also include google sitemap on your website to get indexed easily by google. It adds relevancy to the linked page which directly helps in getting high rank for the linked page
Using text based links with anchor text, footer navigation and inline text link will improve your internal linking structure, so spider can crawl it easily and can add relevancy to the linked page. The closer a webpage from your homepage the higher the value the webpage rank is assigned.
Step 5 Link Popularity Building
There are 2 ways for building link popularity
o Reciprocal link building (2 way link building)
o Non-reciprocal link building (1 way link building)
Reciprocal link building
There are some basic rules to follow when exchanging links:
Relevancy is more important
Check and make sure the reciprocal link aren't being blocked and pages are easily indexed by search engine
Link pages with more than 50 links aren't worth exchanging with
Non-reciprocal link building
It can be in form of paid link, directory listings, social book marking, article publishing, blogs and press releases.
About the Author: IT Global Solution is US based Search engine optimization (SEO) company specializing in Web promotion, E-mail marketing, PPC account management, paid inclusion and trusted feeds, directory submission and article distribution services. For more information please visit Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Company
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Print Article | Download PDF | 77 views | May 18 2007
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