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For those of you new to the world of search engine optimization
it's basically making changes to your website (often behind
the scenes in the code) to make it as easy as possible for
search engines to peruse your site (using "Spiders"
to "crawl" it) so they can evaluate your importance
and rank you accordingly in the search results when someone
looks for your kind of site.
If you are going to seek search engine help from a company,
start with a recognizable name like Microsoft's
Submit It program. It's fairly self-serve but easy to
understand and great for beginning your search engine submission
process and at $49 a year for the basic package, it doesn't
bust your budget. For you Do-It-Yourselfers, here are some
basic search engine optimization tips.
Keywords
Keywords are the actual words and phrases people will use
to search for a site like yours. You will need to select a
series of keywords or keyword phrases. One way to find out
what keywords will work best for you is to find your top competitors
online and find out what keywords they are using; while on
your competitors main page, click on "View" and
then "Source" from your Internet browser. Keep in
mind that you will also need to:
| 1. |
Have at least 100 to 200 words of text on
each page of your site and that your main keywords should
be
used within that text (incorporated into sentences) so
they equal about 5% of the total words. |
| 2. |
Each page of your website should focus on
a different keyword or keyword phrase appropriate to the
content. |
| 3. |
Test your potential keywords by doing a
search for each one; use keywords that produce less than
10,000 results but more than 500 when you search for them.
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| 4. |
You need to list your keywords in the Keyword
Tag in the code of your web pages - keep the list of keywords
to about 1000 characters. Include common misspellings.
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| 5. |
Use keywords in all your Alt tags describing
any graphics on your page |
Title &
Description Tags
Title tags and Description tags are also placed within the
code of your web pages and when someone does a search these
titles and descriptions show up in the search results. You
want to use this opportunity to promote your business and
entice someone to click through to your site in the search
results. A good way to do your title tag: list the ONE MAIN
keyword followed by a dash then a "call to action"
i.e. "Virus protection - Protect your hard drive from
malicious computer viruses." The average search engine
only shows 60 - 80 characters of your Title tag so don't make
it too long. Keep your Description tag to 150 - 200 characters.
Website Content
Sites with too few pages or that don't appear to
have any content (links only) may be refused by the search
engines. So make sure you have lots of original content even
if it's not originally yours. There are many sites that will
let you reproduce their articles or other content to use on
your site. It is important to have a Site Map (a page listing
all your other linked pages) linked to your main page; it
gives spiders a precise map to easily and quickly categorize
your site.
In terms of additional content you may want to add a Resources
section to your site as part of a Reciprocal Link Program
where you offer to link to someone's site in exchange for
them linking to yours. Site popularity is a major factor in
determining your search engine ranking. You need a minimum
of 100 links coming in to your site (links going out are not
so important).
Submitting Your Website
After optimizing your website (cleaning it up to make it search-engine
friendly) the next step is to submit your site. Many companies
offering this service say they will submit your site to hundreds
of search engines but there are only 10-20 main ones that
are important - for a current list check out: http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156221
. Some companies will submit your website to hundreds of small
unknown directories that will list your site in exchange for
permission to use your email address; then you will suddenly
be inundated with the largest amount of junk email you've
ever seen. Also be on the lookout for companies that charge
you more depending on how many pages of your website you want
submitted; most search engines prefer that you just submit
the main page. Open Directory Project is important directory
to submit your website to because more than 90 search engines
use data from it - http://dmoz.org/.
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