Introduction

Of all of the terms, technology, and hype surrounding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) how can you sift though all of it to understand what will help your website rise in the search engine rankings?

This article will present some of the basics to get your site optimized for a search engine.

Background Information

Within the past few years there have emerged three major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search (MSN). As searchers are looking for your information, due to the massive growth of the internet, these search engines are returning thousands or even millions of results. If your information is not returned within at least the top three pages, it is dreadfully likely that the searcher will not find your website!

#1 Use Good Design  

There are two things that you want for any website, first, you want high search engine rankings, and second, you want visitors to stay on your website. Let’s face it, if your pages suck then you’re not going to get high rankings and your visitors are going to disappear in a flash.

Listed below are the chief factors that contribute to getting your pages to rank high in the natural or organic searches.

• Unique content relevant to your website
• Pages that load quickly
• No broken or missing links
• A clean standards based design (XHTML, CSS)
• Having a consistent structure across all pages
• Using keywords on the page and contained in the page content
• Maximizing the use of your “Title” tags
• Maximizing use of your “Heading” tags
• Error free pages
• Text links to other pages
• Incoming links from other sites (especially high ranking websites)
• A sitemap

#2 Optimize Your Code

HTML has been around a long time, and many have learned the basics of using it, but the world has changed, the internet has changed, and search engines have changed. Back in the day you could use Notepad, whip out a website, stuff the meta tags full of keywords and shebang! You’ve got yourself to the top of the search engine rankings. Well no more.

Search engines are smarter; in fact most of them pretty much ignore your meta tags. However using the tips listed above for good design and then using validated code will go a long way in optimizing your pages.

The replacement for HTML is XHTML; this is a standards based language by the w3c organization. In addition, there is a savvy method to control the look and feel of your pages called CSS or cascading style sheets. Using these in combination is extremely powerful because it separates your content (the words) from your mark up (the code that controls how the pages look); this makes your pages smaller and easier for the search spiders or bots to index your pages. Use the test page at validator.w3.org and if your web pages don’t check out, then you should fix them or hire a competent web designer.

#3 Target Your Market

Understanding your target market is important. If you don’t know your target market then it’s like trying to play darts in an extremely dark room, you’re not likely to hit your target! But fortunately, you can find your target market by following a few steps

1.     Understand where the overall market is going and then use that information to target your local market. For example Web Designs Unlimited is in the business of providing website designs to small to medium-size businesses in-and-around the Tallahassee, Florida area. We target our local market since we know most of our business will come from within 50 miles of our corporate headquarters. We also know, that the internet takes down all barriers to doing business throughout the USA, so although a customer might not be from Tallahassee, they can easily use our services, however by staying focused on our target market we will reach more customers

2.     Find a few core things about your business and its products or services that can benefit your customer. For example we target web design, search engine optimization, and internet marketing

3.     Talk to your customers or potential customers, ask them what they want, send out surveys, have a comments box on your website, or ask for comments on your company blog

4.     Look at your competition, what are they offering? How do they position themselves? How does your website measure up to theirs? You can also talk to their customers; sniff around on their websites, in their blogs, and on their forums. Use the major search engines to find out what they are doing so you can imitate their success or avoid their missteps

5.     Find out what your customers or potential customers are searching for by using keyword research tools… more about that later

#4 Use Smart Keywords

The first thing that you want to do with keywords is to get specific, it’s very tough to compete with multi-million dollar corporations with big marketing budgets, getting specific allows you to fall within a niche. Although you may want your website to be found if someone types in “flowers”, unless you’re a big player, it’s going to be tough to get ranked, better would be “Orlando Flowers”, “Orlando Florists”, “Altamonte Florists”, “Altamonte roses”,  just keep drilling down to try to get specific as possible.

Search Engine spiders are programs that search the web for data and then store it in massive databases which are ranked by the search engines to return results when people search for keywords. Spiders cannot read your web pages like a human; they have to calculate a score for your website. These scores are mainly based upon the content of your web pages and who is linking to you and from where. If your web page is about flowers and you’re linked to by other florists, floral directories, or florist guides, it’s going to boost your website ranking.

Once you have picked your keywords, you should check their popularity. There are several online tools such as Wordtracker and Google Trends that can help you get a handle on good usage of words or phrases.

#5 Have Great Content

Remember that you must have great content on your web pages because just having a lot of keywords will not convince a search engine that your site is relevant. Spiders cannot see what is in your website graphics, flash animations, or in your database, and if your using someone else’s content, that may actually hurt you since you can get penalized for duplicate content.

Avoid the following problems

• Using your keywords more than once in your title
• Overusing your keywords in a paragraph, sentence, or page
• Having every sentence start with the same keyword

Building quality inbound links into your site can greatly help your search engine rankings. In addition, good links attract people to come to your website. It can take a while to build links, so consider this an ongoing process. Set a goal for yourself such as “30 links in 30 days”. You can trade links with businesses that are relevant to your website and get listed in business directories. A killer site for finding these directories can be found at http://www.tipsntutorials.com/Top-Directories/ .

You may find that to get links you can just put great content on your website and others will naturally want to link to it. Some ideas are directories of professionals, resources, experts, or other businesses, free software, e-Books, or ways to solve common problems. If you can be the “go to” site in your industry you’re going to get a lot of traffic and incoming links.

Just remember as you’re are building your links to stay away from, spamming forums and blogs, and resorting to using garbage link exchanges. These kinds of things can give your business a bad reputation and can get your site banned from the search engines.