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Be The Hot Dog Stand - Search Engine Optimization

Written by: Cidnee Stephen

Article Overview: You are far better to relinquish some of your budget to being found than making your website just the prettiest one on the internet. The term commonly used for this is search engine optimization (SEO), meaning your site needs to be created in such a way that it is search engine friendly and laden with the proper key words. Here are a few quick tips to get your rankings up!

Be The Hot Dog Stand - Search Engine Optimization

If you had to choose a business, which would it be - the most stunning store in the middle of nowhere or a hot dog stand in Central Park, New York? I hope you said the hot dog stand. It has a much larger chance for success even though it may not have cost a fortune to build. The same goes for your website. You are far better to relinquish some of your budget to being found than making your website just the prettiest one on the internet.

The term commonly used for this is search engine optimization (SEO), meaning your site needs to be created in such a way that it is search engine friendly and laden with the proper key words. Here are a few quick tips to get your rankings up!

1. Know Your Key Words - First make a list of every phrase you can think of that people might use to find what your site is going to offer. Ask your friends and colleagues for input and try to find people that are within your site's target audience to get an idea of how they would search.

Once you have a good long list use search engine databases to refine it and see what people have actually searched for when looking for similar sites. If you have money to spend buy Wordtracker. Otherwise use Overture's free keyword suggestion tool.

Remember the more common the keywords the more expensive it will be to get to the first page. To help reduce costs, add a geographic term or extra common phrases. For instance if your market is in Calgary, then add that word to your phrase.

2. Insert Keywords Within the Title Tag - The title tag is located right at the top of your document. Have a look at your website in your browser. Have a look at the bar ABOVE where you typed the web address. The keywords that are in here hold a lot of weight with the search engines. Hopefully your Title Tag doesn't say Welcome!

3. Use Keywords as Anchor Text - In other words use the same keywords on a page's Title Tags to link to this page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

4. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.
Adding the exact same text for your main header on the page will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Search Engine Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

5. Sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or coloured in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

6 Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

7. Submit to the search engines yourself or get your web developer to do it. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

8. Have links back to your site from high traffic site - The more INBOUND links there are pointing to your web site from other relevant, related and complementary web sites, the better. If you are listed in directories, try to add your website address wherever possible.

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Article Tags: anchor text, calgary, central park, central park new york, colleagues, common phrases, fortune, free keyword suggestion, free keyword suggestion tool, hot dog stand, key words, keyword suggestion tool, middle of nowhere, optimization seo, search engine databases, search engine optimization, search engines, similar sites, target audience, title tag



Related Forum Posts
What Do You Want To Be Taught? - Hi, My name is Jeff Foster, I will be moderating this new section. I want to get your opinion on topics you would like to discuss & be taught on. I see a great need for small business owners to learn how to perform basic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which would include the basics about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What do you want to be taught on? Jeff
Re: Search Engine Optimization - If you are interested to get more information about Search Engine Optimization you can visit Search Engine Watch site gives you a great way to keep up with what’s going on in the search engine world. This site provides a ton of information about a very wide range of subjects related not only to search engine optimization, but also the flip side of the coin; subjects related to searching online.
Re: Can someone explain Search engine optimization to me? - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) could be compared to a big popularity contest: A High School Computer Geek and a High School Football Captain who are trying to promote a party. The computer geek tells everyone in school & even hands out 100's of flyers about his party Friday night...what happens? his friends end up showing up and a few new people...even the new people leave right away because it is not what they are looking for. The High School Football Captain ends up just telling a few good buddies, and within hours the entire school not only knows about it, but everyone wants to come, and everyone does come & stay. One defenition of "optimize is "To make as perfect or effective as possibe." How effective are your article marketing campaigns? Could you be distributing content (that is what search engines index) more effectively? In a perfect world, who would you want promoting your website, web pages, and web content? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is determining this perfect & effective way to do this. Jeff
Re: How do I engage seo works to be done for my site? - I read "Search Engine Optimization" for dummies. Gave me a real good foundation on which to build my sites. Really helped a lot.
Re: How to Promote Your Business Online - Apart from using Search Engine Optimization or SEO for promoting websites, I also find Pay per Clicks (PPC) to be a very good way to do. Why? For me it doesn't open only one oppurtunity for you, in fact it opens 2! You can generate your awaited traffic even w/o saying stop, ready and go and gain a maximized profit too.


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