5 Steps to Better Search Engine Optimization
One of the biggest challenges that face web site owners is trying to traffic to their websites. This is usually achieved by getting the best possible ranking with the search engines, which comes down to trying to get onto the first page of Google or the other engines such as Yahoo and Bing.
It’s important to understand if you are promoting a popular product or services you may have hundreds if not thousands all competing for that same spot. For you to get the edge over the competition you need to do some fine-tuning of your site with search engine optimization. This is not as complex as it sounds and the steps below can give you some guidelines to improving your site to get some search engine attention.
Step 1: Check the layout and design of your website
Whilst you may think you have an impressive looking website, it could also be at the root of your problems. Does your copy start half way down the page, making it more difficult for the search engines to grasp what your site is about? Have you got bloated over sized graphics that make your page slow to load or too much white space between the lines? It’s not difficult to tweak your pages to get them right.
Step 2: Have you placed your keywords strategically through your website?
Keyword stuffing can be detrimental to your site but so can lack of keywords. It’s no longer good enough just to put your keywords in the title and meta tags, you need to have a certain percentage placed appropriately within your copy and articles. Your critical keyword is ideally to be found in your first paragraph of text, and should also be used in headlines and in your hyperlinks.
Step 3: Text links and site maps
To get your site recognized and positioned you need to make sure that all of your pages are being found by the web spider when it crawls your site; which means you need to get your site indexed correctly. It’s important to include a site map in your website that shows all the links to your inner pages. Another good habit to get into is creating a navigation menu with text links, these are a lot easier for the search engine robot to follow and identify all your pages. On page search engine optimization is just as important as off page.
Step 4: Backlinks – Quality vs. Quantity
When you are trying to position yourself a highly competitive category you will need quality backlinks to your site, preferably PR 6 & 7 when you can get them. You will find that when you have good content in your site others are willing to link to you as it provides credibility for their own sites.
But this can take time to build up, in the meantime you can actively search yourself and start requesting links, the more the better. Don’t overlook that quality will outdo quantity any day in terms of getting your site a better ranking.
Step 5: Keep up to date with search engine rulings
Search engines change their rules quite frequently and it is important to keep yourself up to date. This isn’t as hard as it may sound, there are numerous forums and blogs on the net that regularly post information on the latest changes.
Subscribe to informative newsletters or join relevant forums so you always know what changes are in the wind.
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be complex, but following these few simple steps provides the basics for getting started.
