|
What is SEO?
August 27th, 2008 by Dion Munk
|
You've probably heard the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) floating around if you've wondered how to get more visitors to your website. If you haven’t heard about SEO, well, I'll be glad to explain a little bit about what it is.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process and practice of optimizing your website so that it ranks well on search engine results pages (or SERPs). When someone types a word or phrase into search engines (like Google) looking for your product, you want to appear on the first or second page of the search results.
It's interesting to know that there are almost 1 billion different websites that are relevant to the search query, but really, if your website doesn't appear in the first 10 pages (or first 100 results); it's invisible to the world.
Here are a couple of tips you can follow to help get your website a better ranking:
Get a Target Phrase
When you are trying to optimize your website for search engines you should pick a phrase that describes what your website is about. There are a couple of guidelines of what your target phrase should be:
- IMPORTANT - Your phrase should be an important part of the page information. If your page is about soft drinks, then your target phrase should include “soft drinks” and not just the word drinks.
- ACCURATE - One commonly tried “hack” with search engine optimization is to try and use a phrase that isn’t accurate for the content of your site. Although terms like “paris hilton” or “britney spears” are popular, it doesn’t mean you should optimize for them on your soft drinks page.
- POPULAR - If your site is about soft drinks, your target phrase should be one that people will search for. People don’t search for “carbonated drinks” nearly as much as they search for “soft drinks”, so “soft drinks” is a better choice.
There are a few search engine optimization tools you can use to find good target phrases:
- Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity as well as brainstorming ideas for target phrases.
- Google is great for brainstorming target phrases.
- Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and also compare how the competitors use the target phrase you’re after.
Analyze Your Competition
The second big step in search engine optimization is to determine who your competition is. Remember that when you’re doing search engine optimization, you’re working on a page by page level, not the entire site level. So while you might consider any site that has to do with drinks to be your competition, for your target phrase “soft drinks” your competition is more specialized perhaps Coke.com or another soft drink company.
- Check Yahoo and Google to see what shows up when you search for your target phrase.
- Examine the pages on the first page; note where and how they use their target phrase. You can use the “Cached” page option in Google to see your targeted phrase highlighted throughout your competitions page.
Remember that the more popular a target phrase is the more competition there is going probably going to be. Sometimes it’s better to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase there is.
Write Your Page
Search engine optimization isn’t so much about meta tags as it used to be. In fact, focusing solely on meta keywords will only help you a little, and if you go overboard it can actually hurt your ranking. Try the following approach:
- Include your target phrase twice in the meta title tag <title> Make sure that your title is “clickable”. This is what most people see when they search, so keep your title logical and descriptive but not too long.
- Include your target phrase twice in the meta description. This description is used by most search engines as a short paragraph below the clickable title, make sure it extends on the title, and doesn’t just repeat what the title says.
- Include your target phrase in the meta keywords. Don’t flood your keywords, use just a few, and don’t get carried away.
- Include your target phrase in the title or headline for your page. Write that headline using a header tag for your headlines, as search engines often weight words in these tags higher.
- Include your target phrase in subheads, using header tags here too.
- And finally, e sure to include your target phrase in the first paragraph of your page, and twice if you can. Also include it in other locations on the page, including external links, headlines, and sidebars.
Promote Your Page
Make sure that when you announce your page, you use your target phrase in both the link text and any explanatory text. If you run a blog, you will want to blog your page with at least two references to your target phrase.
Check Your Results and Tweak
If Google or Yahoo don’t crawl your site on a regular basis, then submit your page to them. Wait about a week and then go to those search engines and test your search engine optimization target phrase. Your goal should be to get to the first or second page of search results for your target phrase.
Search Engine Optimization Isn’t Rocket Science
It’s more like magic, in many ways, but there are ways to get your pages to show up higher in search rankings, and these five tips should help you to improve your search engine optimization.
|
|
|
featured project
|
