Search Engine Optimization Exposed
The most useful search engine optimization tips for your online businessNow that you have built a great website, search engine optimization (SEO) comes next. SEO helps you to rank higher in the search engine that rank for about 80% of site traffic for most websites these days. The best part is that you get FREE and TARGETED traffic through SEO.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the term given to optimizing you website in a way friendly to the search engines so that you get ranked higher in search engines like google and yahoo.
Much attention has to be paid on SEO. I will give you an example that will explain the point. Say for a particular keyword your website appears on the 3rd page of google. Then you will get 1% of the traffic your competitor website on page one would get for that same keyword. IMAGINE THAT!
Some people say that SEO is a very difficult job and is only for the pros but I think that SEO is just an extension of old form of marketing. Its just virtual marketing. Today SEO is like a voting system. The more votes you have the more popular you are. Votes might be backlinks.
SEO mainly has 10 Steps :-
- Market Research
- Keyword Research
- On page Optimization
- Off page Optimization
- Site Structure
- Link Building
- Brand Building
- Viral Marketing
- Staying Up to Date
- Blogging (Last but not the least)
Do you have what it takes to compete in a market?
The first thing that you should do is pick up your niche. After you have done that and done your keyword research its time to search the popular search engines to find out what kind of sites come up for your keyword choices. They are your competition. If you find that mostly government websites or college websites or media websites show up then please do think again.
Keyword Research
When you do a niche research or specialty research you shall also have to do a keyword research. There are several keyword research tools available on the internet and some of them are FREE. You can try out the one at seobook website. You can also create a google adwords account and by doing that you shall get a keyword research tool for free and that too from a company like google.
On Page Optimization
It is hard to rank for keywords that do not appear in your page content. So each page should be optimized for a particular set of keywords so that they get ranked for that keywords when someone searches google for it. You should also mix some related keywords or related keyword phrases into the page to get a better relevance rank in search engines. Unique and descriptive page titles upto 65 characters should also be used. Page title is something that appears at the top title bar of your web browser when you visit a certain website. Page titles appear in the search results and many websites will use your page title as anchor text when they link to your site. If possible also created hand crafted meta description tags to complement the page title. Though meta tags are slowly loosing importance for search engines but definitely they do complement the title tags. So its better if you give them some weightage too. For important points on the page you have to use H1 and H2 header tags. You can also bold keywords using the <strong> tag for keywords you want to give importance to. You should also use good anchor text phrases for links on your page. If you use any image on your page then you should use a relevant filename and also use an alt (stands for alternative) name for that particular image. Remember search engines cant see photos so it relies on file names and alt names. Last by not the least try keeping some related links with good keywords near the footer of the page.
Off page Optimization
Off page optimizations is like showing the search engines how popular you are and how much people talk about your website. Now you might ask how will you ensure the popularity of your website? Well the answer is by bragging and doing your own publicity. If search engines find the mention of your name or website url in other popular sites it will think that you are also a popular website and will give you more importance in its rankings. This can be done using the following methods :-* Press releases
* Article distribution
* Social networking
* Link campaigns, by asking complementary businesses to provide links to you
* Directory listings
* Link exchanges
* Three-way linking
* One-way linking
* Blogging
* Forum posting
* Multiway linking
All these take time in doing but brings very rapid and fast result. You will be surprised at the effectiveness of these methods. They work better than on page optimization.
Site Structure
The most important goal of a perfect site structure is to cut down on unnecessary code so that search engine bots don’t have to wade through huge number of irrelevant lines. The layout should be easily readable to both the search engines and human visitors as well. The site should be nicely laid out. One small way to reduce on code volume is to use CSS (cascading style sheet). You can define the font formatting styles and link styles and don’t have to repeat them over and over again through the code of the website in every page. Some rules of on page optimization also applies to site structure as well. They are proper meta tags, title tags, alt names for images, H1 and H2 headers where necessary etc. By using these rules properly you can make your website easily crawlable by both spiders and humans as well.
Link Building
Link building falls under the category of off page or rather off site optimization. The term link building refers to placing your website links on relevant and related high quality websites. These links are one way pointers to your website. Now here two terms are to be noticed. One is ‘relevant’ and the other is ‘high quality’. Suppose you have a website on gardening and you place you link in a blog which talks about body building then google will not give you any credit for it. In fact it might even penalize you for such a link. So, when you submit a comment on any blog or forum make sure that is related to the topic you are dealing with in your website. Then comes the word ‘high quality’. Do not place your link on just any website. Be sure to judge its quality before placing a link on it since google will not give any credits for a link on a useless website. So the question arises how will you know whether a site is of high quality or not. The way to ascertain this is to check the google Page Rank for that particular site. You can download the firefox extension of google toolbar to check this. It tells you the Page Rank of every page you visit. So before starting to do link building it is advisable to check the site popularity of the directories or blogs you are going to place your links in. Also if you are posting your link in a comment in some blog make sure you read the article you are commenting on and write something which is well thought out and something which others find interesting to read. This has another indirect advantage. It lets other visitors to the blog or website visit your website by reading your comment. Also make your name prominent there so that you slowly start building credibility. Online credibility is a very valuable asset which I am going to deal in the next section.
Brand Building
Brand building on the internet is like building your good will in business in the real world. It has become important more than ever before. Say you manage to get some 2000 hits a day but then you shall have to think about how you can make those visitors come back to your website again and again. Here is where the term brand building comes into play. The first point that you are to remember in brand building is ‘practice what you preach’. Suppose you are selling an ebook on flat stomach exercises. Now if you have not read the book yourself then I suggest never even attempt to sell it. If you are selling some product or a book or a piece of software which has not been built by you or written by you then I suggest you get a copy and read it or use it. This helps because the pitch you will write about the book or the software would appeal to the visitor even more and after buying from you he or she will refer his or her friends back to your website to buy from you. This really helps in the long run. Also remember to make the look and feel of your website professional so that it doesn’t seem like it has been built by an amateur. Look and feel along with navigation of your website will go a long way in building the credibility of your website.
Viral Marketing
Marketers nowadays use pre-existing social media networks to spread the word about a product or a service. They use social networks to spread the buzz about their product or service from one person to another just like the biological virus or a computer virus spreads from one person to another or from one computer to another. Hence the term ‘viral’ marketing. The best thing about viral marketing is that once you set the ball rolling it moves with its own momentum. It also multiplies its effect. We shall be discussing more about viral marketing in my forthcoming articles as it is a specialized area to be covered in this span.
Staying up to date
People ask me how often should you update your website?
This depends on how often data on the topic changes that you are dealing with in your website. If you are dealing with weather reports then you might need to update your website maybe twice or thrice a day. If you are a historian, you might not need to change your website in years. But from the search engine optimization point of view you should update your website and add new content to it regularly if you intend to stay at the top. This will give you an edge over others. Search engines love websites that are frequently updated. Now from this point of view this frequency keeps changing with regards to the frequency that your competition is updating their website. If your competition is updating daily you shall also have to add content daily to win the search engine battle. But what I suggest is if you can add content to your website twice every week it is fair enough. You shall definitely get noticed by search engines. If you have a blog then try writing something every two days.
Blogging
There is a lot of controversy as whether to blog or not if you have a website. If you take a close look at the top ranks of google you shall find that 80% of them are blogs. So I would suggest that its better to blog. Then comes the question of how frequently should you blog? I would suggest that the best approach should be once a day. Google gives more weightage and visits those blogs on a more frequent basis which are updated everyday. But if you cant make it everyday make sure you blog three times a week in regular intervals.
Targeted Traffic -Vs- Non Targeted Traffic
It is definitely important to get traffic but it is also immensely important to get Targeted Traffic. Target traffic means visitors who are looking for the product or service which you are providing. I have a very good compilation of tips which you can use to gain targeted traffic. Click on the line before to read them.Conclusion
So armed with all these tips and techniques I would assume that you are in a good position to start your own website and optimizing it for search engines. I will be dealing with all the search engine optimization techniques given above shortly on my website. So keep and eye! Wish you all the very best with your SEO attempts!
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