The following is an explanation concerning eleven of the most important tasks you need to know in order to raise a web site's search engine ranking. You may have already discovered that hunting for clues about SEO on line is very unrewarding. Solid SEO information - for free - on the internet - is hard to find. A great deal of money is made by providing teasers and dead end information about how to bring more traffic to your site. I've personally wasted a lot of time and some money on seeking real answers to how to improve a web page's ranking. This article provides some important leads and tips that make a difference in your search engine rankings. I use these myself so I know they work.
The process of performing SEO involves two main areas: on-site optimization and off-site optimization. The rest of this article presents the ins and outs of these two areas.
ON SITE OPTIMIZATION
There are six steps to optimizing your site so search engine crawlers and robots like it:
• Make sure you validate all the code in your site - every page. If you want more information on validating code go to validator.w3.org and use their free services. If you have Adobe Flash anywhere on your site you will probably find that it does not validate. I like flash but this can be a real downer if you also want search engines to like your site. Search for Flash validation - and read the different solutions if you really need to just have to use flash.
• Use keywords carefully and with research. Keywords are important and make a difference. Optimize these by researching your competition's use of keywords and keyword-phrases. Either copy what they are doing, or find your own keyword niche.
• Use your keywords and phrases in your title, H1 and H2 headers, and in the content of your page; however, don't write for the robots. Write for your visitors. Over use of keyword phrases will put you on the bottom of the page ranking. Make sure that your title tag is no more than seven (7) words long and contains your keywords. Use the "|" vertical bar key above your enter key to separate keyword and keyword phrases in the title.
• Check out your server htaccess file. Note that it may be listed as htaccess.txt, and if so, it is not active. To activate it, change the file name to.htaccess. Make sure that your file is set up to optimize your domain name and security. The explanation of what this really means is provided most eloquently by Feyd, the moderator of the Javascript Kit forum, athttp://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml. I was very grateful for the keen understanding of this vital part of on site optimization that is not referred to much in general optimization discussions.
• Using images for navigation look great but crawlers and robots can't see them. When you use an image - for any reason - make sure that you provide a liberally descriptive 'alt' tag ending with | image. Google particularly likes that. Try not to use images by themselves for navigation because they robots don't read them.
• Create a sitemap.xml file so that crawlers and robots can look in one file and see what is on your site and crawl from there. Google has an excellent piece of software called GSiteCrawler that creates a sitemap file, uploads it to your web site if you want it to, and pings Google and Yahoo that the file is there - or has changed.
OFF SITE OPTIMIZATION
Off site optimization really means making your site popular for people. The concept is simple but there is work involved. There are 5 essential off site optimization items:
• Link to relevant, free, on-line directories. Only link with directories and other sites that have a Google ranking that's higher than yours. A rule of thumb for me isa ranking of at least a 3 but that depends on how competitive the market is for the business that your web site is in.
• Do not link to YellowPages.com or other pay for listing services unless the market that you are in is one that has a very strong history of getting sales results through the phone. YellowPages.com and others will promise you the world but my experience with clients and with myself is that they just want to get your one-year commitment and move on. They aren't interested in your success.
• When getting links on other sites, make sure you use your keywords for the link - not your URL.
• It is OK to link to other sites - just don't go hog wild.
• Write articles and submit them to free submission listings. In these articles you often cannot refer directly to your site. Many (not all) sites avoid marketing scams and spammers by disallowing links and URLs in the text. That's ok because they all allow you to refer to your author bio which is on it's own page on the web site. So write lots of useful articles and remember to refer them to your bio - on the web site in question. Place these articles in their own listing on your web page - and refer to them in your articles when you can. The main idea is to make your site popular so write articles about topics you can help others with and then refer to your bio. If you do it right - lots of people will link to your site - including other 'ezines' and article farms that will refer to your article or copy it for themselves.
• Create a social network account just for the business or web site and place customer comments, sales events, and no BS personal information about how you are dealing with the business and what you are planning. Please keep your competition in mind and don't give them information too soon. Keep your customer's in mind and use the social network to help people and meet people - just like you would. If you have an SEO client then you've got to make sure that they are on board, they keep the social network up to date, and you just support them in it and make sure you have lots of links to the site from the network, and links to the social network from your site.
These instructions will get your SEO off the ground. Please realize that this list of optimization techniques is easy to read through but you will have to spend time nurturing links, generating excitement, and getting popular!
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