Tuesday, 11 June 2013

How To Search Engine Optimize Your Website Before It's Too Late

By Sawyer Lunthmoreland


Maximizing your search engine optimization efforts incorporate a variety of different things. Luckily, this article provides numerous resources and helpful tips that will allow you to tailor your efforts into being more effective when you are planning and implementing your search engine optimization related efforts, in order to be more productive and effective.

Title tags are a critical part of Search Engine Optimization. Title Tags appear in your browser window in the title bar. They clue the search engine in as to what kind of information is on your page. You should label each page's title tags with different keywords to bring in more hits.

Flash navigation might be pretty, but a search engine spider can't even see it. If you insist on having your navigation, or entire website, built in Flash, make sure you provide alternate HTML navigation somewhere on each page. Also, have HTML pages available so that the search engine can index them and give you a correct Page Rank.

Skip the white text on a white background tricks to try to game search engine rankings. All of the top search engines are already onto these tactics and have built punishments into their algorithms. In fact, you need to be extra careful that they don't THINK you're doing it! Even if you're using CSS to set the background, the spider might think it's actually text which is the same as the background. Be careful!

Be careful how often you use ALT and TITLE attributes on a page. If you have 14 images and very little text, the ALT and TITLE tags, full of keywords can appear to be overused and an attempt to game the system. Try to balance out, how often you use them against how much copy is on the actual page.

Feel free to use the meta keyword tag, but don't include too many words. Use only your top 3-5 phrases of 2-3 words each, and make sure those words are also repeated in your copy. The meta keyword tag has mostly depreciated, but there are still some search engines that make use of it.

After you've run through your website with all the automated tools, it's time to do some manual inspections as well. Install the browsers that are likely to view your website and check it out in each. View it on a Mac and a PC, a laptop and a mobile phone. Don't forget a tablet or two! Don't forget to try different screen resolutions, too. There's no point in driving traffic to your site if they can't see it as it's intended!

When optimizing a website, you need to pick one search engine to optimize for, otherwise, things will get very complicated. The most used search engine is Google, so it's best to start there. Many websites have articles detailing what Google is looking for, as well as, how their algorithm treats a webpage with a lower page rank.

Double check that your pages don't appear to have duplicate content, even if they seem different to you. Run similar pages through a uniqueness calculator, and make sure they are get at least a 50% grade. Search engines will penalize you if they believe you are repetitively posting the same content on your website to attract traffic.

Validating your HTML is all well and good, but don't forget about your CSS! A key part of SEO is having your website appear as intended. Otherwise, your monetization techniques may not even show up at all! Double check every element of your website, making sure that it appears to everyone in the same way.

Keyword research should NEVER end. New competitors will pop up all the time, so check out what they're using to drive traffic to their site. New items may be added to your website, so include the new keywords on those pages. A new hashtag might start trending that applies to your site, don't forget to use those, too!

You aren't going to become king in a day but these tips are going to put you solidly on the way to becoming king of your keywords. Incorporate as many of these tips that you can to see your ranking start to soar. Keep in mind that the more popular your keywords, the harder your fight for status is going to be. Keep following these tips and keep learning new ones to rise above the rest of the field.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment