Wednesday, June 10, 2009

How to SEO a Website

Here is an article on SEO I wrote I think it covers some good topics.

Truly one of the most argued aspect of online promotion and one if mastered will grant you the ability to make money online and a lot of it. To begin SEO stands for search engine optimization. To optimize a website for search engines a couple of tasks need to be completed, but before that one rule must always be maintained which is never sacrifice readership for optimization. What this means is never make you visitors suffer just because you would like to rank well within the SERPs. Now another thing before we discuss search engine optimization is you must keep a balance, do not go overboard making your optimization techniques so blatant that a blind search bot will be able to tell that you are trying to rank well for a certain term.

Now the first steps of optimization begin at the first line of code placed on your website. META tags should be placed on each page and differ from page to page. One important step of optimization that new webmasters sometimes forget is every page they create should be optimized as a suitable landing page meaning that every page (with exception of login and other pages that have no useful content) should be built and have the time that matches your home page. Now as you optimize your website make sure that the description and title do have the keyword or phrase that you would like to rank well for and look very pleasing to potential visitors that are searching with Google and other major search engines. Remember your title tag and description is what the search engines will display to people searching online so if you stuff it with keywords even if you rank well for the term most people will skim over it. Attempt to make it pop, think to yourself what title and description would you most be likely to click on. Though some webmasters disagree it is also good to place Meta keywords in your site; Google does not use them, but yahoo still places some degree of importance on the keywords.

Now once you have your metas it is time to work on your websites content. I cannot stress enough it is extremely important to not sacrifice the readability of your website when placing keywords throughout your website. The headings are what search bots will look at when trying to find the main theme so take time and try to implement you main keyword or key phrase when placing your headings. It is also a good idea to use the keyword or phrase within the first couple sentences. Personally I recommend a density of a two keyword phrase that you would like to rank well for in Google to have a density of 5%. If you would like to get a keyword density checker do a Google search for “keyword density checker” and the first site will work fine, in fact the first 5 or 6 are all very useful density checkers. So after you have your content with a prevalence of keywords that you would like to rank well for you should work on your link building making sure to anchor the keywords within your hyper links both on site and off site.

Link building in a nut shell is any and all off site online promotion that you do. You can gain links from an array of resources such as article directories, free URL directories, social bookmarking, blogging, blog commenting, forum posting, and press releases just to name a few. When placing a link on a site besides your own make sure to place the keywords in the text of the anchor tags. For example a hyperlink that you place off your site should look like a href=”www.yoursite.com” your keywords /a I have found it very useful to rotate 6-7 keywords and phrases that you would like to rank well for rather than just the same one over and over. You should also be doing this on site. If you are still using the home button in your navigation bar then get rid of it and replace it with the keyword phrase you would like to rank well for, it is also good to place a keyword phrase on the bottom of each page that points back to your home page.

Anyways this is just the start that is the long process of climbing the Google SERPs (search engine ranking pages). Remember join a couple webmaster forums to stay on top of any new ideas and/or changes. Well you know the basics so get out there and begin to make money.

3 comments:

  1. For a search engine to recognize the value and relevance of a page, it must receive help from the creator of that page. Properly optimizing your pages to make them “search engine friendly” can greatly increase your search engine rankings, traffic levels, and potential earnings from your website.

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  2. You are very correct infact it is good to check and see if the user is using java script as a navigation or using rel="nofollow". Anyway good points.

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  3. I agree with you Kris...it is a must that when writing articles, you don't just write for search engines crawlers and bots but also primarily for visitors...once you were able to do this, you can be assured that your readers' will keep on visiting your site because they know they can get something from it.

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