How to optimize your site
I don't like doing SEO, but its very much needed. Search engine optimization for your website should be one of a webmaster's main goals. Getting traffic from the search engines is not only free but is also constant (depending on what keywords that you are targeting) traffic. Below is a plan that web masters should follow when they decide that they will start optimizing their websites, you should include a combination of onsite and offsite search engine optimization.
Step one: What keywords your going to optimize for
Think of what keywords that you want to target. If you target the wrong keywords then you may never see any results for them, just some common sense. And if you target overly competive keywords then it may take too much time to see results but once you do it will be well worth it. I would recommend targeting in the middle when selecting keywords to optimize your site for when you're starting out.
Here is a free keyword tool that you can use to get an idea of what keywords are popular: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.
Just a quick tip when selecting keywords, I usually use the plural version for keywords or keyword phrases because the plural version includes the single one. For example if you have a keyword "shoe" try making it "shoes" because the keyword "shoes" include the keyword "shoe" but its not the same in reverse.
Step two: Start onsite optimization
This is one layer of search engine optimization and this process includes manipulating the source code of your website with keywords. The places to put keywords in your website includes the title tags, meta tags, within the text of your website, and within links (anchor text).
Title tags: This is the most important part to place keywords in your website and surprisingly a lot of web masters just leave this area blank. Search engine bots show the most prominence (importance) to keywords within the title tag which is why its critical to include keywords here.
Place keywords here
Text of document
Meta tags: Place keywords here but be careful not to place too many here or else you will be viewed as spamming the search engines "keyword stuffing." These use to be an easy way to score top rankings in the search engines but the search engines have evolved overtime and this is no longer possible to score high rankings with stuffing the meta tags. You will need a proper combination of onsite and off site optimization which I will explain later. Meta tags goes between the head tags in your source code.
Description Meta:
This should be a description of your website and always put important keywords in the beginning of the sentence if applicable."
Meta Keywords:
Some quick tips. Try to use the plural form of your keywords here and to also see if there are common misspellings for popular keywords and lace them here. DO NOT repeat keywords.
Heading tags:
Heading Size 1
Make sure to place your keywords here because this helps tells search engines related content on your website.
Keywords in the anchor text:
This is important, whenever you are linking within your website make sure to place keywords in the links, search engine algorithms like this. For example, if your selling a weight loss product instead of having a link that simply says "click here" have the anchor text say "click here to get the ultimate guide to weight loss." Anchor text code=Keywords go here
Alt tag
If you have a lot of graphics on your site there are a couple of things you want to do. First, you want to make it small as possible without losing none of the quality if possible. Websites that are bombarded with graphics usually take some time to load which can cause visitors to get impatient and leave so this is important to keep in mind. Also, make sure to place keywords in the image alt tags:
Make sure to actually describe the image, just don't use this as an extra means to stuff keywords, and use the keywords here that you have in your title and meta tags. Make sure to spell correctly (unlike what I'm doing) when your working on the on site optimization for your website. NEVER EVER copy and paste text from word into your html text editor, that can cause all types of complications. Write your keywords up in word and the copy and paste your text into a text editor like notepad or wordpad and then paste it into your html editor.
Offsite optimization
Offsite optimization has nothing to do with manipulating the source code of your website and relies heavily on links which brings me to my first tip with optimization, and that is to write articles. The funny thing is by getting links to your site is also a quick way to get indexed in the search engines.
Writing articles:
I like writing articles because the Internet was made for information and when someone is searching for something online they are most likely looking for information that they are searching for, I will assume that you did a good amount of searching today or browsing if your reading this right now. Okay, write and submit articles to website directories. I have tested and founded that a 3% keyword density is usually perfect when writing articles. Always place keywords within the anchor text in the links of your signature.
Classic blog and ping:
Search engines love blogs, and these are an easy way to get backlinks to your sites. Just open up a free blog at blogger and make a post with a link back to your site. You can also try deep linking by linking to other content parts of your site as well in your blog.
Blog comment:
Find the top blogs in your niche and leave a comment, but no spamming... thats just tasteless.
MSN, Google, and Yahoo Homepage:
Make and customize your own personal webpage for each of these search engines and post your articles here with a link back to your website. They also have RSS so that you can syndicate your content as well.
Google: pages.google.com
Yahoo! my.yahoo.com/
MSN: my.msn.com
Press release:
Write and syndicate press release, this is a great way to get backlinks as well as also get some media attention about your website.
Extensive list (Link bait)
Take the time to make an extensive list of links to useful resources, this is great ways to make your website ready to get eaten up with links.
Build a 101 list:
These are almost next to impossible to not get linked to and often get dugged often in digg. I wrote an article in a couple of hours titled 101 muscular ways to get more traffic to you website and blogs and this have given me enormous amounts of backlinks and a good amount of traffic from the search engines, blogs it was reposted on, and forums as well.You can also make a separate page on your website for directories. These are great way to link to useful information, but its also a great way to link to pages within your site (if its useful) a process called deep linking.
Sitemap:
Sitemaps are important because not only does it help make your website easier to navigate for a first time user, it also helps spider your site which will help your content get indexed in the search engines. There is no secret, if the pages are not indexed in the search engines then that means they cannot draw any traffic from them. So, this is where sitemaps come in. Sitemaps are written in xml, a language I don't like but a language the search engines love (same languages that blogs are written in). Once you have your sitempap which has to be in .xml format before you submit to Google go here:
www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
Here are some xml sitemap creators:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/google_sitemap
http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/
Yahoo sitemap
To submit go here:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
MSN sitemap
To my current knowledege, MSN doesn't currently have a particular place to submit sitemaps to, but from my understanding if you submit your sitemap to Google, then MSN will pick it up because it can understand that protocol. Go here for more information if your curious: http://sitemaps.org.
This should work for Yahoo! As well, so thats why its important to always submit your sitemmaps to Google. Also, here is another trick that you can do. You can always ping the search engines so that you will tell them that "hey I updated my content come and visit and spider my website you." Here is the code: http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.YourSiteMapURL
There you have it, a nice summary of what you need to do in order to start an effective search engine optimization plan so quick reading, print this out, and get started working, all the best.
Doug Purcell
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