Search engine optimization is following a few simple guidelines on each and every page of your website to present your pages in a way that site and its pages come up higher in search engine results. In other words you could think of search engine optimization like following a formula for success.
You must optimize your site if you are serious about your site's online business. Paid advertising is one way to get traffic, but that takes money and a continuous flow of it. But, with getting found on the front page of search results is free traffic to your site.
The Basic Steps of Search Engine Optimization
You should know, the search engines derive their income from advertisers and users of their services. With this in mind, search engines are looking for good useable content that a user can use to forward their reasons for on the particular search engine snooping around. It is your job and responsibility of your site to put out good useable relevant content if you want to be ranked well in the search engines. If you don't your pages get much traffic and your site will have limited success to be found in organic search inquiries.
Modify the Title Bar
The title bar is found at the top of your web browser when you are on any website on the Internet. When you are on your website you will want to take notice of what the title bar says. The title bar should have in it the keyword, or the theme of the page in it. The theme of the page should probably hold the keyword that you are basing the page on. You may also want to put your company name in the bar, but it is not necessary unless you are looking at your front page.
You will want to do this modification for every page on your website. Make sure to pick a different title message which should correspond to the theme of the page, or the keywords of the page. Pick several keyword phrases to use in the title bar. However, you should avoid long combinations of keywords. Try to stay with 6-8 words or less. Also, try not to duplicate any words in title bar and if you have to don't put them side by side.
Analyze Content On Each Page Of Your Site
This step will take some discipline and runs hand in hand with the first step that I mentioned above. Each page of your site should focus on a limited set of keywords having to do with the theme of the page. Pick out relevant keywords or keyword phrases relevant to the theme of a particular page and then use those keywords and phrases several times in the beginning of the page. You must do this in a natural way that doesn't look weird to the reader. Remember, the way that you present content to your reader must make sense to them - is it something you would say in conversation with them? If not, then maybe you shouldn't write it.
Pick The Right Content To Be On The Page
Each page of your site should contain at a minimum at least 250 words. If you can't do this, make sure that you use at least 100. Here's what you want to think about. Again we're back to your responsibility to the user, are you putting out useful content? Are you really able to convey useful forward causing action with less than 100 words? Perhaps you say yes, but realize what the search engines are looking for. They are written to look for some substance that they can give to their users. They don't want to put "blank" pages in front of their readers.
You don't want to go much over around 750 words as this length seems to get lost on readers. Yes some readers have ADD. A guideline to go by is if you get to where you are going over 750 take a look at your work to see if you are starting to present another concept or theme. If you are then you might want to start another page.
Do Not Get Too Flashy
I know, I can hear it, you like the look of flash on your site. It looks cool. Yes it does, I agree, but search engines cannot read flash presentations. Sorry. If your front page of your site has only flash on it, you may want to rethink your marketing strategy with it. If you are wanting it to show up naturally in the search engine results when people are searching for keywords related to your site, then you will not want to have just flash on your page. Find a way to get some text on the front page too. Some people just use their front page as a business card. If this is the case then keep just the flash, but don't expect it to get found in the search engines.
Do Not Get Too Graphic
Here I'm building on the last item I just presented. Just as you don't want to have just flash on your site, you also don't want just graphics. Designers like to build jpeg's, and gif's, and png's to contruct websites because they can do some really great designs that way. But, if you main message and theme words are contained within the graphic they are not going to get indexed by the search engines. In other words, if your content if contained in the graphics of your site, the search engines cannot read the graphic. You will need to either replace the graphic with text or add text to your graphic.
Make Sure You Have Meta Tags
There is much debate on how important meta tags are. Who knows whether I'm right or not, but my opinion is that those sites without can't be helped by them if they are helpful, and those with them can be helped if they are helpful.
First you need to know whether your site has them or not. Go to your site in your favorite browser. Go to the top menu in your browser where it says "View". Click view and look for something that says: "view page source" or "view source" or "source" or something along those lines. Then near the top, in let's say the top 50 or so lines of text you should see something like: " meta name="keywords" content=". If this is blank or you don't see it, then you should speak to your site webmaster about putting them in.
How Important Is Your Site?
This question is answered in a way that you probably aren't expecting. The way that you know if your site is important is to know how many other websites are linked to yours. In other words, if your site is linked to from 300 sites then there is 300 votes for your site being important enough that other website owners/webmasters would put in a link to your site. The way that you check for this in Google is to put this in the search box: "link:yoursitedomain.com" and hit search. This will tell you how many other sites are linking to you. Increase this number and increase your search engine rankings.
This overview of search engine optimization breaks a little of its own rules in terms of length. I did this so you could have one page that you could reference to help your efforts out. There is a ton of information on the Internet about search engine optimization. Much of it is a repeat of what and how someone else said it before. Just as these words here aren't necessarily my new ideas. Rather I have attempted to put some of the ideas and things that have worked for me in my search engine placement efforts into one document that others can use. Good luck and check back here for more information as I get it published.
Article by Dale Stouffer. Dale has been a mortgage broker and Internet marketer since 1996. He is a contributing author at New-Cash.com
