The Ten Important Steps for Optimizing your Website for Search Engines
“The Ten important Steps for optimizing your website for search engines:
In these ten steps we will know ten basics and important steps to optimizing a website to perform better on major search engines. If you will follow these steps correctly your website search engine position website will be surly improve depending on you industry competition.
Step 1 – Keyword Selection
Step 2 – Creating optimized Content
Step 3 – Site Structure
Step 4 – Internal Linking
Step 5 Submissions
Step 6 Link Popularity Building
Step 7 – Title and Meta tags
Step 8 Monitoring
Step 9 social bookmarking
Step 10 Testing
Step 1 – Keyword Selection
Selecting Keyword is the single most important factor in the entire search engine optimization (optimisation) process. Choosing the right and relevant keywords will not only help you in getting good search engine position and targeted traffic but it will also increase you return on investment (ROI).
Example: If you are a company based in UK providing search engine optimization (optimisation) (SEO) services. The first keyword in your mind 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 Uk” and “Search engine optimization company Uk’ this way you are targeting two keyword at a time with less competition that means more chance of targeted traffic and good Search engine positions.
Keyword selection and research tools
The Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
Site: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Word Tracker
Site: http://www.wordtracker.com/
Step 2 – Creating optimized Content
There has been lot of changes in the search engine algorithms but there is no change in the importance given to quality content. In this step we will focus on how to create optimized and unique content for high search engine positioning using the keywords we have selected in the first step.
Unique and well written content will both grab your visitor’s attention and at the same time, make them want what you have to offer. So write in keeping mind what your audience are looking for and targeted keywords.
First ask yourself some questions:
What services you offer
Do you provide the services your visitors are looking for
Do some research
Provide as much as possible information on the subject. Provide useful and unique information about your industry / subject area it can entice your visitors to visit your website in future. It has found that most of the online visitors search for information about their interests.
Content Optimization
Four important factors for optimizing content
1. Heading Tags – (H1 to H6)
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 site to these bold words. it gives the reader a way to find the information you are referring to.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the no. 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 spiders read your site. 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 site
While creating folder and files use keyword
Eg: 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 spidered by search engines from anywhere. You should also include Google sitemap on your site 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 use inline text link will improve Your Internal Linking Structure. So spider can crawl it easily add relevancy to the linked page. The closer a page is in clicks from your homepage. The higher the value the page rank is assigned.
Step 5 Submissions
Where to submit:
o Search engines
o Web directories
Major search engines to submit
Google.com | yahoo.com | Msn.com
Major web directories to submit
1. Yahoo (paid)
2. Dmoz.org (most important)
http://www.about.com/
http://www.incrawler.com/
http://www.jayde.com/
3. http://www.wowdirectory.com/
Step 6 Link Popularity Building
There are 2 ways of 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 indexed
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 bookmarking, article publishing ,blogs and press releases
Step 7 – Title and Meta tags
Once you have planned and completed the site structure and content integration. Its turn for Title Meta and Description. Unique and optimized title and Meta tags are really helpful in achieving higher search engine positions
Title:
this tag represents information of page this can be in browsers header bar
Meta keywords:
This include the targeted keywords for that particular page
Meta description:
The Meta description shows on the SERPS (search engine results page). It is used in describing the products / services you offer to your customers, you can describe specific pages within your website that shows in the search results page.
You can describe your pages the way you want them to be seen by your visitors in the SERPS (search engine results pages)
Next is alt tags, Alt tags is a white hat SEO practice used very commonly by search engine optimizers
Step 8 Monitoring
There are three basic things in the monitoring process. They are:
Monitoring your search engine positions:
You can go through the searches manually, you can use software like IBP to check your rankings or you can use online. There can find many related Seo tools listed here http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html
Monitoring Back Links
Schedule weekly checks of how many backlinks you have and are your link partners still linking to you
Monitoring Changes in the Search Environment
The last thing you will have to monitor is for changes with the search engines themselves.
Visiting forums and subscribing to newsletters to keep yourself updated about search engines algorithm changes
Step 9 social bookmarking
The social bookmarking is used by many people to bookmark their pages and websites. Using the social bookmarking visitors can bookmark the sites listed in the social networking websites. The popularity of the websites in the social bookmarking world gauged by most favorites websites among the visitors. The most bookmarked website obviously will get more traffic than others and it can also help improving your search engine ranking in major search engines.
How does it work?
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Webpage Urls, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
Most bookmarking websites allows to enter multiple tags for your web pages in order to be searched by the visitors that helps social bookmarking visitors to get relevant and accurate search results for their keywords.
Advantages
1. Social bookmarking helps in promoting your website users market your site.
2. It indirectly helps by building a brand.
3. Generates targeted traffic.
Some important social bookmarking sites
Dig.com | Blink |Del.icio.us |Digg |Furl |Google |Simpy |Spurl |Y! MyWeb
Step 10 – Testing
You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now its time to see if all that hard work done has achieved the main goal of reaching the visitor and to convert them to a customer.
o Check for broken links :
o Other script errors
o Ease in navigating site
o visual appeal of the site
o placement of content
o are you able to find what u are looking for
You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now you should test your website for errors (i.e. 404 not found error, script errors etc.).
Check for broken links :
Other script errors
Ease in navigating site
Visual appeal of the site
Placement of content
Are your visitors able to find what they are looking for?
”
Sandeep Tyagi
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/the-ten-important-steps-for-optimizing-your-website-for-search-engines-67620.html
How to Find appropriate keywords for website?
This step requires lots of time & research. It’s very important to find appropriate keyword for your website and build the content around this. It’s pointless to optimize your website for the keyword that is not searched by users on the internet zone. Use the keywords that are searched by users and have less competition. Why I am telling less competitive because if you optimize your webpages for the keyword that returns millions of webpages in search engine then you will never get ranked top in search engine for that keyword. So select the keyword that is less competitive and demanding. So either you use any software to complete this steps for you like IBP or do it by your self. Here are some tips while choosing the keyword. For more tip visit on…
http://blogyourbusiness.blogspot.com
Here’s some free tools.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
http://www.seo2020.com/seo-tools/keyword-research/keyword-research-tool/
http://www.nichebotclassic.com/
References :
Michael
http://www.webmasterautomation.com/
Hi,
Yes, indeed. Get this book: Search Engine Optimization – An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin. It’s all you need to beat you competition.
Of course, you don’t set up SEO on your Web site. It’s the things you do to attract targeted traffic to your Web site.
Search engines look for lots of quality content, lots of pages with relevant and interesting content – information that visitors find interesting and helpful.
Visitors are not looking for your Web site. They seek information via keywords entered in a search engine like Google.
Keyword analysis is the first step in SEO. Google can help you with that.
The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is an excellent preliminary brainstorming tool. Let’s say that you have ten ideas for a theme or Site Concept. This tool gives you a superb "high level snapshot" of how profitable each of your Site Concept possibilities might be. Here’s the URL: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – remember, it’s free.
Many people new to Web site creation believe that you just create a Web site and they will come. Like the baseball movie, Field of Dreams (1989), where Kevin Costner creates a baseball field in the middle of nowhere and soon thousands are flocking to the field.
This only happens in the movies, not in real life.
You must attract the search engines(SEs). The most cost effective way to do that is by creating lots of Web pages with quality, relevant content (information) that matches user’s needs and requirements for information..
Potential visitors do not look for a web site per se. They do not enter your Web Address. They are looking for information. They do not enter your Web site URL into an SE. They enter keywords or phrases into the SE and the SE responds with millions of Web sites in many cases and then the surfer may make his keyword more relevant and try again. Most surfers only look at the first few pages even though there may be millions of hits on a particular keyword.
So the first thing you must do is to brainstorm you keywords – which keywords are relevant to the theme of your Web site.
But this is not enough. Remember the concept of supply and demand?
Let me explain. If there is a low supply of something, say a commodity like coffee, that means that there is not much available. What happens if many people all want a lot of coffee. That creates a big demand for coffee, but when they go to buy coffee the price has gone up. It went up because the demand exceeded the supply. This causes the coffee growers to grow more coffee. They grow too much and there is a big supply, so the price drops because the demand has dropped owing to the increase in the supplies of coffee.
The same concept can be applied to keywords or phrases. Really scarce keywords with hardly any supply related to your Web site theme.
How do you find those keywords that have a huge demand and very little supply?
Aye, that’s the rub.
One of the ways to do this without spending any money is to use Google’s AdWord tool: (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).
This tool is actually intended to help advertisers decide which keywords to buy. It provides Demand (they call it "Search Volume") and "Advertiser Competition" (another kind of Demand for your keywords!). This tool even provides the "monetary value" (optional) of your keywords (i.e., what advertisers can expect to pay).
So what do you (a publisher (a Web site builder), not an advertiser) look for? Remember this for now…
* the more relevant keywords that are generated by this tool,
* the greater the Demand ("Search Volume") for the keywords,
* the greater the "Advertiser Competition", and
* the more the keywords cost advertisers…
… the better for you!
Just go through the tutorials that Google has to offer.
The other tool for keywords is Wordtracker – it is not free, but is the best on the Web for analyzing keyword demand and supply: (http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html). Try their free trial. I entered "free keyword analysis" into Google and got 11 million hits so you know it’s a hot topic.
Once you know what your keywords are, they form the basis of creating Web pages for your Web site. You sprinkle relevant keywords throughout your Web page. These will attract the SEs and if you have enough pages, you will rise up through the ranks and hopefully achieve a listing on the first page of the SEs.
The SEs use software called "spiders". The spiders job is to crawl the entire universe of Web sites and index them by keyword. The database index is why they can return an answer so fast because there are now a billion Web sites or so and still growing fast.
You keep adding pages to your Web site – the more pages the better. That’s why the phrase, "Content is King!" came about. The SEs love lots of high quality content.
That’s also why most 5 – 10 page Web sites attract no targeted traffic. The SEs just ignore them.
No content, no crawlers for you…bad dog.
However, all is not lost because once you get to about 30 pages, the SEs begin to take notice. When you reach 50 pages, you may see a page ranked number one in an SE, but don’t stop there. Keep adding pages – just one a day would mount up to 365 in one year.
Now, where do you find software that can build your Web site. Here is one that is free and it’s a lot like Microsoft’s Front Page. These are sometimes called WYSIWYG editors, pronounced "wizeewhig" and means "What You See Is What You Get". Another more expensive editor is Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, but this costs several hundred dollars. These are designed for the Geeks of the world.
The Web site for the free WYSIWYG is: (http://www.nvu.com/index.php). NVU; pronounced "New View". There are free tutorial there. More tutorials can be found by entering "free nvu tutorials" in Google.
You may want to try GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). This is a free graphics editor that rivals best of breed Adobe Photoshop. There are free tutorials for GIMP, too here: (http://www.designyourownweb.com/gimp-tutorial.htm).
It’s a good idea to have some pictures and graphics on your Web pages to tantalize your visitors. . Not too many, though, because the search engines only recognize text. The ignore the pictures and graphics.
We now have to get recognized by the SEs. If you have enough high quality content and are patient, eventually the SEs will discover you. Impatient people use something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Internet Marketing. Here is a new book that does just that: "Search Engine Optimization – An Hour A Day" by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin.
Then, there is Brad Tabke’s "26 steps to 15K a day". It boils down to solid content thoughtfully put together can make more impact than a decade’s worth of tweaks that may or may not work such as fiddling with META tags. Find his 26 steps here: (http://www.frihost.com/forums/vt-2797.html).
This is the exact same plan used by Site Build It. See Ken’s blog: (http://blogit.sitesell.com/waltera1.html). I’m not saying Brad stole it from Ken Evoy, but Ken developed what is known as the C + T + P + M formula.
This is how the formula works:
Create in-demand content (information) – C
Attract Targeted Traffic (visitors) – T
Presell Those Visitors – P
Monitize Presold Traffic – M
Content
Web users search for information, for solutions. They are not looking for you – they don’t even know you (yet!). They seek what you know. Give it to them. Convert your knowledge into in-demand Content. (http://ctpm.sitesell.com/waltera1.html) To succeed online, start where they start – at "the search."
Traffic
Your topical content ranks high at the Search Engines (ex., Google, Yahoo!, MSN), attracting free, targeted (i.e., interested), open-to-you visitors. Basically, these future customers "meet you" at your site. These visitors are known as "Traffic.".
PREsell
Complete strangers develop trust and confidence in you. Why? You "PREsell" by OVERdelivering what they seek… relevant, original, information.
Deliver it in your own voice, in your own way. Go beyond merely instilling confidence… your visitors will like you.
Monetize
Convert warm, willing-to-buy ("PREsold") visitors into income. Called "Monetizing," this is the easy part. But "M" cannot happen if you fail to first execute C T P. This is where 99% of small businesses fail.
Brad also created and runs one of the best forums for Web site building information at: (http://www.webmasterworld.com/).
Get this book about Google: Google Hacks by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest. Some of the hacks are written in perl. I do perl, but there are other hacks which don’t require it.
So hack away. And don’t forget to check out Brett Tabke’s "26 Steps to 15K a Day".
Kindest Personal Regards,
Walt Brown
Site Build It Certified Webmaster
http://results.sitesell.com/waltera1.html
capecod1@capecod-beaches.com
P.S. Finally, get this book: "Spidering Hacks – 100 Industrial strength Tips and Tools" by Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain.
References :