Search Engine Optimization(SEO) Basics

Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short has become a critical factor in the success of any web site. Thousands of web sites are added everyday and more and more people are using Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo to find what they are looking for. Most people searching online don't browse beyond first three to four pages of search results, so even a web site that is listed within first five pages of result set may also have trouble generating traffic.While this may sound like a disappointing news for new web sites but there are ways to improve your ranking in organic search engine listings.

 

Here are some of the simple things that webmasters can do to make their web sites more appealing to search engine robots and spiders. This may not get you listed on the first page in major search engines but this is your step in right direction. Remeber, most of this is basic stuff and you don't need the services of a Search Engine Optimization(SEO) expert to get started on them.

 

Appropriate Page Title

Page time for any web page should be relatively short and must describe the page content accurately. If possible, try to include your main keywords in your page title itself. For example;

<title>Linda's Flower Shop</title>

This is a good title but take a closer look. As the nature of this business suggests, you can tell that most of the customers are going to come from th local market. So if Linda own a flower shop in Chicago, it make sense to have city name in title itself. Why? well, most people who would search for a flower shop in chicago are likely to include Chicago in their search query and page ranking in search results depends on the match between page content and search term.

 

Well Written Meta Tags

These are used to describe thee description and keywords in the header of each web page. Make these tags different on each web page. Also make sure they are closely related to the content of the web page. Now a days, search spiders are smart enough to read through the content and figure out the importance of your web page for certain keywords. If metatags don't match the content, you're not going to beget any significant leverage by search spiders.

<meta name="description" content="Suppliers of quality fresh cut flowers, greeting cards and accessories.">
<meta name="keywords" content="flowers, roses, vase, stuffed animals, retail, discount">

 

Optimized Heading Tags

Search engines still place more emphasis on text within heading tags, so make sure they use keywords. Use one h1 tag per page with the most important keywords. Use other head tags (h2, h3, etc) to provide variations and support to the main heading. For example;

<h1>Desks</h1>
<h2>Large Desks</h2>
<p>... information about large desks...</p>
<h2>Small Desks</h2>
<p>... information about small desks, etc etc...</p>

 

Web Page Content

Quality of your content is one of the most important factors in your web page quality score. Make sure the text of your web pages contain keywords and common phrases that people might search for. Be careful with the frequency of your keywords - you want to have them occur at least a few times if possible, but don't repeat yourself so much that the copy becomes unnatural. The idea is to discretely spread keywords around without making it obvious. Remember that text contained within images won't be picked up by search engines. Only actual text on the page will be indexed. You also want to make sure how to write your keywords. For example, if you run a web site that sells Flat panel TVs, you can do some smart tweaking to get more targeted traffic. For start you can change 'Plasma TV' on your page to 'Buy Cheap Plasma TV'. You can also change 'LCD' to 'LCD HDTV'. What you're trying to do here is to get customers who are more likely to purchase your product. If a consumer is searching for 'Plasma TV', there is no guarantee that he/she is looking to purchase one. After all, he/she may be just looking for some basic information. Even worse, he/she may have one already and probably searching for some troubleshooting help. These customers may generate traffic to your site but they don't add any real value to your business. On the other hand if someone is searching for 'Buy Cheap Plasma TV', he/she is more likely to be a customer.

This list is by no mean exhaustive. However, these are some of the very simple techniques that should be part of design standards for a good web design firm. If you're doing it on your own, make sure you apply them in practice and if you have a professional designing your web site, make sure you pay close attention to their content management and search engine optimization(SEO) work.