So you want to SEO your website. You probably read some place online or even on a forum that if you correctly SEO your website you can draw in thousands and thousands of highly targeted visitor all at little or no cost to you. Well that information is correct, but what you dont really know is that it might cost money, and it will cost you a lot of work.
First lets go over the very basics of SEO. What does SEO even mean? It stands for Search Engine Optimization. Using this on any website will allow your site to rank in the search results for some of todays biggest search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Thats great and all but what does it mean for you? Well if you could get your website ranked in the search results for keywords that are targeted to whatever your business might be you will almost instantly receive hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your website, and we all know the key to running a successful website is getting traffic.
Imagine your business being placed right in front of the eyes of millions of people who all want what you offer. Now think if you sold something on your website. Now you can see the big picture, and just how powerful, and profitable a well optimized website can be.
Now let me go over the basics of how to optimize your website. First and most important is content. Every website needs content, and the more you have the better. Search engines love new content. Im not just talking about one big page loaded with content. Im talking about a number of different pages each related to your website. The more content and pages you can have on your website the better chances it has of becoming well optimized.
The second most important thing, and some even think it might be the first is getting links to your website. Now I know you probably are wondering what in the heck is he talking about? Well you will need to go out and exchange links with other website to help increase your popularity. Now you dont just want to exchange links with any old site you come across, but you want to exchange links with websites that are similar to yours, and make sure both of your sites share information that is related to one another. This will show the search engines that your site is worth taking the time to look at. It will also help increase your rankings.
That about covers the basics of Search Engine Optimization. There are a number of other different techniques you can do to help achieve better results, however you must first master the above materials before you can move on.
Why is SEO important?
* SEO pulls more traffic than pay per click advertising.(80% of internet users click on the first three listing of google)
* Natural listings are non biased.
* SEO gives better return of investment than any other marketing medium.
* No bidding wars or click fraud in SEO
* Helps in creating an online brand.
SEO Techniqes
If you wish to do SEO in house then the first thing to do is keyword research.
What is a keyword?
The term keyword simply refers to the topic you are going to write about.
Keywords are very important for getting your site listed in the proper category.
To know more about keyword research,please read my hub about keyword research.
After the keyword research is complete you will need to research your competition.
Competition
SEOchat.com offers a free tool with the help of which you can calculate the competition.
When you type a keyword,a certain percentage for the competition is shown.A high pecentage means high competition and a low percentage means low competition.
Following competition analysis,you have four important tests to perform before starting your work on the website.
The tests are
* Find all your competitors
* Find how important these websites are
* Find how many sites link to them
how many pages of the competitor website are indexed by the search engine
SEO involves mainly
1. ON PAGE OPTIMIZATION
2. OFF PAGE OPTIMIZATION
On page optimization
* On page optimization starts with page structure and metatags.Although meta keywords and meta description add little or no value to your site,meta titles do.Meta titles is one of the first attributes search engines see.
(Tip:(from wikipedia)To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots.)
* THe next things that the the search engines see are the header text.Having an H1 tag at the top and H2 tag on the bottom of each page will help to tell the search engine what your page is about.
* Having the correct content also plays a major role in on page optimization.Keyword density and correct placement of keywords is essential.
* Correct URLs are important.You should keep your URL short and make them related to your page's content.
* Search engines cant understand what the pictures are about until you tell them.Adding image alt tags to the images will help them index your images properly.
* Creating an HTML site map is essential for online users.Try to keep each page of your sitemap under 100 lines.
* Creating an XML sitemap is essential for search engine spiders.Different XML sitemaps are required for multiple search engines.
* After you have your website built and optimized,look into you site so that you have no errors which is very important.Google offers free webmaster tools that allows you to check crawling stats,link stats and errors on your website.To find webmaster tools just go to google.com and check for webmaster tools.
Off page optimization
The key to link development to get many high valued websites to link back to you.You want important websites and all pages that relate to your website to link back to you.
1. Submitting your website to online directories
2. Submitting to local directories
3. Registering with online yellow pages
(Remember that one way links are more valuable than two way links)
Another great link building technique is article submission.For example,if you sell fish tanks and you write ten articles about how to care for a fish tank,other people may want to reas them.So distribute your article all over the web to sites like ezinearticles.com,and each article will link back to your site.
You can also get links from online press releases, blogs and feeds.
These are the basics of SEO.Please post your doubts and remarks about the hub in the comments section.
it is really good as well as informative for biggener seo
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