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Optimize Your Website For Search In 3 Steps

Written by: Jay Hamilton-Roth

Article Overview: Since the purpose of having a website is for people to find you online, I wanted to go over some basic strategies for ensuring that people searching for your types of services/products find your small business’s website.

Optimize Your Website For Search In 3 Steps

Since the purpose of having a website is for people to find you online, I wanted to go over some basic strategies for ensuring that people searching for your types of services/products find your small business’s website.

The goal of optimization is to have your website listed before your competitors ("ranked highly") (ideally on the first page of search results, which most people don’t look beyond).

Most search engines report the result of searches in two groups: sponsored ads and normal ("organic") searches. Sponsored ads appear because the company has agreed to pay the search engine (via a pay-per-click [PPC] ad campaign) money whenever people click on their ad for specific keywords. PPC is a great way to generate traffic quickly, but it’s often not cost effective long-term. Long-term you want your website to appear organically highly ranked.

When a person does a search, the goal of the search engine is to show the most relevant websites that likely match the person’s search terms. The goal of optimizing is to make your site highly relevant for specific search terms.

1. Identify the search terms you want to rank highly for . As in all forms of marketing, you need to think like the person who’s looking, not as the business who’s selling. That means you need to know what keywords people use to search for businesses like yours. This information is easy to find from pay-per-click programs, such as Google Ad Words Keyword Tool . Don’t forget to also spot trends (using a tool such as Google Trends) in keyword searches, since you want to catch "up-and-coming" searches that might be ranked low now.

2. Use the keywords in relevant pages in your website. Keywords are seen in: the main body of the web page, meta tags (less important, but still worth having), and the alt-text in your images. Use keywords naturally - remember the point is to have more customers. If your website isn’t human-readable, then all your work will be for naught. Also, make sure that if you want to target customers in a region, you use your region in your keyword phrases.

3. Get links to your website. Search engines rank websites by their "authority". One way they measure authority is how many (and which) other websites link to them ("backlinks"). One backlink from an top-class website is worth hundreds of poor-quality links. You can get backlinks from a wide variety of sites: organizations that you’re a member of, blogs, and directories. One tool I recommend is Directory Submitter, a free tool to get backlinks. Be warned: Google is in the process of penalizing websites with paid backlinks. Also: submit your websites to the search engines (if you have not already) so they can explicitly add your site to their directories: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

There is a lot more to search engine optimation (SEO) that these tips. Don’t forget there are professionals that can help you with your search engine optimization (I’d be happy to recommend some).

Related Articles
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  Search Engine Optimization - 5 Steps toward Maximizing your Benefits
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  Basic Introduction to Proper SEO
  How to Optimize Your Site For Search Engines

Article Tags: ad campaign, campaign money, google, google trends, images, keyword searches, marketing, match, meta, naught, optimization, pay per click, relevant websites, search engine, search engines, search terms, small business, traffic, web page, website keywords



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Re: SEO... - 1: Find the Best Keywords 2: Discover Your Competitors 3: Optimize Your Title 4: Optimize Your META Tags 5: Use Headings 6: Use Title and ALT Attributes 7: Nomenclatures 8: Create a Site Map Page 9: Include a robots.txt File 10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google MySQL/Oracle:
Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
Re: How do u optimize a Blogger blog? - Hi GT, Of course there is a way and you know it, you wrote it down in your question. 1- Optimize your main blog code : Meta keywords, title, description. 2- Optimize your post - look at it as a web page. You need keywords (tags), use them in your title, first and last paragraph, and variations on the entire blog. Use the Strong tag, add title to links and alt to images. This is it. The key here is to do a good keyword search before writing.
Website SEO Marketing Consultant from India - Hi all, I am search engine marketing consultant, and has worked on seo marketing of several online websites. In case you need any help or facing any issue related to SEO/SEM, you can post your query. I have 4 yeards of experience in following :- a ) Search Engine Optimization/Marketing b) PPC Promotion c) Website Development too;)
Re: SES Toronto Next Week - In that case, how about the following? Track: Get Me Up to Speed * State of Search Marketing in Canada Track: Practical & Actionable * Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions Track: Advanced * User Search Behavior * Social Media Success * Web 2.0 & Search Engines * Giving Credit Where It’s Due: Which Campaign Sold What?


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