Thursday, May 20, 2010

Some Basic Search Engine Optimization Steps

Website Analysis


Before optimizing a website a thorough analysis of the website, its content, potential customers should be done. A competitive analysis of the competitor’s website to find out what new techniques they are using. This would give you an idea of the strategy which you could use for your business promotion.

Keyword research

Relevant keywords play a major role in search engine optimization. With the help of certain keyword research tool you get the best & the most frequently used keywords. Before preparing the final list of keywords an analysis of the competitor’s site, keyword phrases & Meta tags should be done thoroughly.

On page optimization

It includes refining of HTML code, content analysis, developing optimized pages, creation of sitemap so as to enable search engine spiders to assess the nature of your website.

Off page optimization

It includes search engine as well as directory submission of your site. Search engine submission ensures that the search engines are aware of your online presence. Directory submission would provide your site with the much needed exposure. They are a good way of generating back links thereby generating targeted traffic to your site.

Monitoring & position reports

It includes monitoring the keywords finalized before optimization and the modifications made post optimization.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Why SEO is important for your web site

It is the method of analyzing and constructing individual web pages, as well as entire sites, so that they can be discovered, analyzed, and then indexed by various search engines.

SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.
Why would this be of great importance to you? Would it be important to you if customers were unable to find your telephone number or find the address of your business? I do not think that many businesses could survive for very long in this situation.

This situation could apply to a web site. Can potential customers locate your current web site easily? Traffic to your web site could be extremely low. Potential customers might not even know that your site exists.

"Wait a minute!" you say. "We have a beautiful web site, and we include the web site address in all advertising campaigns. Why would people be unable to find our site?"
Of course, your current customers and persons already acquainted with your business would be likely to find your web site without difficulty. Wouldn’t they?

Are you absolutely sure that your advertising has reached enough potential customers? Did you consider that some people simply do not read the newspapers? How about people who didn’t get the issue of the magazine where you placed an expensive ad?

Did these people hear the WABC radio broadcast when your commercial aired? Were they watching channel 44 during the news hour? Were they on the direct mail list for which you paid thousands of dollars?

So how about those search engines that everyone uses? Potential customers will type a word or two into the box, hit ’Enter’, and immediately find a listing for your company’s web site. One more click and you have another visitor. Search engines sure are great, aren’t they?

Yes, they certainly are great, and the ’type-and-click’ scenario above does happen. More often than not, however, it doesn’t happen without a little work. Search Engine Optimization is that work.

Title Tag Best Practices

Highly relevant to the page

Probably 5-12 words, but ideally under the 70 characters limit, so the full title appears in Google SERPS (search engine results pages) but it depends on the page content - character counter.

A call to action which reflects exactly a searcher’s intent (ie to learn something, or buy something, or hire something. Remember this is your hook in search engines!

The perfect title tag is unique in relation to other pages on the site.

I like to ensure my keywords feature as early as possible in a title tag
For me, the company name goes at the end of the tag, and I use a variety of dividers as no one way performs best

I like to think I write titles for search engines and human
Know that Google tweaks everything regularly - why not what the perfect title keys off?
Don’t obsess! Natural is better, and will only ‘get better’ as engines evolve
I think the more unique a title is relative to the site, the better in the long run.