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A Simple Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Guest post by: Norma Maxwell

Article Overview: You want to make sure your customers can find your website online–but how? There are lots of answers to this question, but the first thing you should do is make sure your website is optimized for search engines.

A Simple Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Other than a visitor typing your website url directly into their browser, and links to your website from other places on the Internet, search engines are the only way people can find your website. Search Engine Optimization refers to the steps you take to make your website is "search engine friendly" so that search engines will find you, and the number of visitors to your website will increase. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing or MSN scan the web for words and phrases that people search for from their websites. This is referred to as "crawling" the web. Once your website is crawled, it can be indexed by the search engines, and your information can be returned when someone searches for your products or services.

When someone performs a search for your product or service, the search engine returns a sorted list of links that it determines are most relevant-starting with the most relevant and ending with the least. This list is referred to as the "search engine results page."

Here is a basic (by no means exhaustive) list of things you can do to make sure your website is crawled and indexed by search engines, as well as a list of things to avoid that will make your website difficult for search engines to crawl, or worse, banned from search because of things the search companies do not like.

THINGS TO DO:

• Think about the words your target customer will use when searching for what you have to offer. These are going to be your "keywords" and "key phrases."
• If possible, use keywords in your url-this is not mandatory, but search engines do like it.
• Use keywords in your title tag. This is the title of your page and will be displayed on the search engine results page. Every page of your website should have a unique page title. It should be short (5-6 words), and descriptive with keywords for the content of that page near the beginning.
• Make the links on your website keywords if appropriate because it will be counted by search engines as a vote for your website as well as for that keyword or keyword phrase.
• Use appropriate keywords in the your headings etc. Make sure the content under those headings pertains to the heading.
• Use keywords in your website copy and make sure it is unique and relevant to the keywords for the page.
• Use fresh, useful, and original content on your website, and change it out often because this will make your website more relevant as measured by search engines.
• Make sure that all links coming to your website from other places on the web use the same url. Do not use different variations of your url because it will be counted by search engines as an entirely different url, which works against you when you are trying to increase the relevancy of your page.
• Make sure that the links coming to your website come from websites that search engines consider to be popular, measured by the number and popularity of the links pointing to them, because this will make your website more relevant to search engines.
• Make sure the links coming to your website are coming from websites that have content that is relevant to your content. Search engines frown upon sites linking to yours when there is no good reason for it.
• Use keywords in the alt tags of your images if appropriate, and include the word image because search around images has grown tremendously, and will continue to increase in the coming years.
• Make sure your website has a sitemap. In simple terms, a sitemap is just a page of your website that lists every link that you wish to have followed by search engines within your website.
• Make sure to link all of your social media pages. Your social media pages (such as on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) carry a ton of weight with search engines.

THINGS TO AVOID:

• Dynamic urls, (i.e. urls with this special characters at the end such as: php?id=1234=123%)
• Pages that use frames
• Pages that use Flash
• Websites that use a splash or entry page
• Pages that cannot be accessed from the home page
• Pages that have too many keywords or phrases on a page (no more than 10% of your content)
• Pages that have duplicate content
• Links to your website from link farms or paid link websites

If you follow these basic guidelines, you will be on your way to a well optimized website!

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Article Tags: Internet Marketing, Keywords, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO, Web Marketing
Referred by: http://www.success-stream.com/



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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