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A Simple Guide to Search Engine Optimization

by Norma

You have a website for your business, and you want to make sure people can find you online–but how? There are a lot of answers to this question, but one of the first things you should do is make sure your website is optimized for search engines.

Other than a visitor typing www.yourwebsite.com into their browser, and links to your website from other places on the Internet, search is the only way people can find your website. Search Engine Optimization refers to the steps you take to make your website is “search engine friendly” so that search engines will find you, and the number of visitors to your website will increase.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing or MSN scan the web for keywords and keyword phrases that people search for from their websites. This is referred to as “crawling” the web. Once your website is crawled, it can be indexed, and your information can be returned when someone searches for your products or services.

When someone performs a search for your product or service, the search engine returns a sorted list of links that it determines are most relevant–starting with the most relevant and ending with the least. This list is referred to as the “search engine results page.”

Here is a basic (by no means exhaustive) list of things you can do to make sure your website is crawled and indexed by search engines, as well as a list of things to avoid that will make your website difficult to crawl, or worse, banned from search because of things the search companies do not like.

Things to Do:

Think about the keywords and keyword phrases your target customer will use when searching for what you have to offer. These are going to be your “keywords” and “keyword phrases.”
If possible, use keywords in your url–this is not mandatory, but search engines do like it.
Use at least one keyword in your title tag. This is the title of your page and will be displayed on the search engine results page. Every page of your website should have a unique page title. It should be short (5-6 words), and descriptive with keywords for the content of that page near the beginning.
Make the links on your website keywords if appropriate because it will be counted by search engines as a vote for your website as well as for that keyword or keyword phrase.
Use appropriate keywords in the your headings etc. Make sure the content under those headings pertains to the heading.
Use keywords in your website copy and make sure it is unique and relevant to the keywords for the page.
Use fresh, useful, and original content on your website, and change it out often because this will make your website more relevant as measured by search engines.
Make sure that all links coming to your website from other places on the web use the same url. Do not use different variations of your url because it will be counted by search engines as an entirely different url, which works against you when you are trying to increase the relevancy of your page. Always use http://www.yourwebsite.com/ to link to your website.
Make sure that the links coming to your website come from websites that search engines consider to be popular, measured by the number and popularity of the links pointing to them, because this will make your website more relevant to search engines.
Make sure the links coming to your website are coming from websites that have content that is relevant to your content. Search engines frown upon sites linking to yours when there is no good reason for it.
Use keywords in the alt tags of your images if appropriate, and include the word image because search around images has grown tremendously, and will continue to increase in the coming years.
Make sure your website has a sitemap. In simple terms, a sitemap is just a page of your website that lists every link that you wish to have followed by search engines within your website.
Make sure to link all of your social media pages. Your social media pages (such as on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) carry a ton of weight with search engines.

Things to Avoid:

Dynamic urls, (i.e. http://www.yourwebsite.com/page.php?id=1234=123%)
Pages that use frames
Pages that use Flash
Websites that use a splash or entry page
Pages that cannot be accessed from the home page
Pages that have too many keywords or phrases on a page (no more than 10% of your content)
Pages that have duplicate content
Links to your website from link farms or paid link websites

If you follow these basic guidelines, you will be on your way to a well optimized website. If you decide this is just too much work, contact us, and we will be glad to discuss our seo services with you.

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Note: I first published this article on Biznik.

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