How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engine Use

by R. Weatherly Business Professional

How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engine Use

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Content still reigns as the king in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Some websites get on top of search engine rankings because of high-powered link building campaigns, but when you talk about visitor loyalty and traffic retention (and yes, public consumption), it will always require that good old optimized content

Steps

1. Dedicate some time to writing really great content. The saying goes that you should write for people first and search engines second. This basically means you should be creating really quality pieces that are useful and engaging for humans because the search engines will recognise your efforts. Your readers will share your work generating additional backlinks, not to mention extra traffic, and search engines will recognise your quality piece because it will flow naturally with not too many keywords (something which is penalized in the post Penguin Update world).

· Write content people want to share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks. The search engine will read those social signals as a signal of the quality of your domain. You can accelerate the spread of your content on these sites by having an account on these social networks with lots of followers.

· Consider submitting your content to sites like Reddit, Delicious, Digg and other content aggregators that might gain you a few readers. ,

· Go back and SEO rewrite some old content. Chances are you know stuff about search engine optimisation that you didn't know last year (not to mention changes in SEO best practices since last year). Re-visit some old content and re-write it with your search engine optimisation hat on, updating image attributes, changing keyword density, adding links to your home page and other relevant content on your site. Even consider republishing as a fresh article for extra brownie points with the search engines!

· Get links to your pages from other trusted websites.

· Even if you are new to the web, you have natural links you could try to get. All businesses have suppliers whether they be accountants, solicitors or raw material providers. All these suppliers are bound to have a website, contact them to arrange a link exchange: encourage them to put up a 'client' page on their site with a link to your website if you put up a 'providers' page on yours. That's 15 or so backlinks straight away!

· Complete all image attributes. Pictures dress up your pages but search engines don't really know how to deal with them unless you complete all the nitty-gritty details like title, caption, alternate text, description. Be ethical though, don't use it as an opportunity to cram an extra few keywords onto the page as this will likely have a negative impact on your search engine ranking. Some people search for what they are looking for via Google image search, if you're image is highly visible then your potential customers will likely visit your page.

· Diversify anchor text links. As Aaron Wall pointed out, there needs to be some variations in the text when one creates those blue-highlighted anchor text links. The links on a page are what the search engine spiders follow in determining your website structure. Most likely, the text used in the links are being considered in figuring out what a page is all about. You may also set some keyphrases in bold letters. That tells the spiders which terms you’re trying to emphasize, just don’t overdo it.

· Take note of word count. Although it’s been a classic rule that “readers online do not read”, it simply doesn’t mean that one has to deprive the online users of good, meaty content. Stick to at least 250 words a page. SEOs know that writing down for an appropriate length of text means being more able to include more related terms for the target keywords.

· Avoid duplicate content. The content on your website should be unique from those of other sites on the web.

Page Format Issues

1. Title Tags The first is your page title. It’s very important to put keywords in your page title; specifically try to get important keywords first and try to limit the overall length of your page title. Well-constructed title tags contain the main keyword for the page. It should contain less than 65 characters with no stop words such as: a, if, the, then, and, an, to, etc. Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and commas.

2. Header Tags Next, it’s important to look at the header tags on your site-h1, h2, h3, h4 and so on. H1 is the most significant. Make sure you have the most important keyword labeled as h1 tag. This will help you with ranking for your site, especially if someone is searching for that particular key word or phrase.

3. Page Content Next up is the content. You definitely want to put your keywords in the contents somewhere, but the object, though, is to make sure the content is very well written for visitors to your website. You want to insert the keywords for that page only where it makes sense. Page content should have between 300 and 700 words of descriptive content that contains the keywords specified in the keywords meta tag for the page. You also want to try to optimize your URLs. Make sure to include important keywords in the URL.

4. Meta Tags Next are the Meta keywords and Meta description. These are pieces of code behind the scene. The code should look something like this: It should be placed directly under the title tag codeYour site tittle

5. Navigation Next is to have proper navigation. Each page of your site should contain links to every other page so search engine spiders can find every page. This is an important step for the proper indexing and page ranking for your site.

6. Site MapNext is having a proper site map. It's important to use two site maps for your website--an XML version and a static version. The XML version can be created by sitemap generators tools such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. The static version should be a HTML page that contains links to every other page.

Video

http://youtu.be/sRlO0JAyNPk

Tips

· SEO-friendly content is no longer the restrictive,robotical-sounding content it used to be. Search engines, in their aim to continuously refine search are catering more to the online readers, the social aspect of the World Wide Web. Content comes out to be more human-centered, and ready for consumption.

· Usage of JavaScript, Flash & frames. Search engines are not always can correctly process links on JavaScript, therefore it is desirable to use them as less as possible. The elements of a site executed on Flash, are not indexed by many search systems. If internal links of the project are made in Flash, the majority of search systems will not find these pages. Each time when there is a new page on a site, it becomes to the known search engine only when it will be found by the robot of the search engine. If the page is located in the heart of a site, it can occur very much at a distant day. Sitemap placing frequently solves a problem of indexation and site reindexation.

· Dynamic pages are tough to index as it contains too many special characters, some bots takes much longer time to index those pages or sites as well. Try to avoid dynamical writing of site pages.

· If you have a local business, get listed in the Google Local Business search results. 86% of people looking for something offline will search online using the likes of Google and Bing. Even businesses like hairdressers and butchers can't afford to miss out on a spot of search engine optimisation. Head over to the Google Local Business Centre and add your business to the map, that way your business info and contact details will appear next time a potential customer searches for a service you provide in your local area!

Related wikiHows

· How to Improve Search Engine Ranking

· How to Get Your Site Indexed in the MSN Search Engine

· How to Search for Phrases & Expressions in Search Engines

· How to Find Free Content for Search Engine Optimization

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engine Use. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Hidalgo Jones

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http://linkedliberation.com

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