Search engine Optimization (SEO) is about optimizing websites to achieve high rankings on the Search Engines for the selected key phrases.
SEO involves making changes to the HTML code, content and structure behind your website, making it more accessible for Search Engines, and by extension, easier to find by users. SEO rewards relevant, helpful websites that add value and give visitors what they are looking for.
To generate a significant amount of traffic the website needs to be listed on the major search engines high enough to be seen. Statistics shows that users are not likely to see listings beyond the first 30 results.
How to optimize my website to be seen by search engines?
There are two basic steps to optimize a website, the first one is to select key words to use in the website and the second one is to use those key words in the website.
Step 1: selecting keywords
For your website to be found by your targeted audience you should know what words your audience is looking for, to do that start by writing down the keywords you think your customers will look for to find your product. Assume your website is about beauty products your list of keywords may include:
Beauty products, aging, skin care, cosmetics
There are different SEO tools available online to research those keywords, and how much users search for them, but in this post, we are going to use Google Adwords tool.
In Google Adwords tool, enter those keywords, and specify your target countries to get the average search volume for those keywords on each country and to have suggested keywords from Google for your target market.
Back to our example using Google Adwords tool, we found that “cosmetics” gets the highest average search volume in the US for the period from Dec 2006 to Nov 2007, which makes it a good keyword to use in the site. The tool also suggested more relative keywords like “Make up” that can be used in your site if you find it relative to your products.
Step 2: using your keywords
Now you selected the keywords you want your site to be associated with, the next is to optimize your site for those keywords by using them as follows:
1. Use those keywords in your site HTML tags (Meta tags, title tag, and header tags) to indicate their relevance to your website content, but use them smart as not to be perceived as non-sense text.
2. Name the images in your website, and use those keywords in their ALT tags.
3. Add content to your website that talks about your products, and provide valuable information to you customers. In your site content, use the keywords frequently, but without affecting the quality of content to make it useful for both the spider and your customers.
4. Highlight important points in your content using bolding, bullets and italics and make sure highlighted content includes your keywords.
5. Use clear and relative link names within your website.
6. Link to other sites related to your product, and have them link to your website. Linking will increase your site rank and its relevance.
Applying these two steps to your website will increase its relevance, and give it more chance to be crawled by search engine spiders. However, you have to keep monitoring the rank of your site and try to improve it by applying those steps to all new sections and always have more sites linking to it.
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May, 08, 2008 3:13 PM