SEO Your Website and More

Search Engine Optimization is an important process for any professional website. In this post I will explain why Search Engine Optimization is key to your business success and also how to improve upon it.

What Is Search Engine Optimization:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website easier for search engines to search and catalog your website. Optimizing how the Search Engine lists your website compared to your competitors. For instance if your wanting to get a high ranking on sites like Google, Bing, and Others you will need to make sure that your site fits the search engine requirements and is optimized for their bots.

How to:

SEO is not a very hard thing to do. There are some basic methods that you can do to make sure your website is optimized for the bot. When a Search Engine Bot comes to your website it views the website in its HTML format. This means that it can't see your fancy flash but it can see the comments and other things on your website. A bot goes from top to bottom of your HTML document and then records basic information about the website. For instance it records the title, meta tags, headers, links, pictures, alt tags, and a whole host of other things.

The one most important thing on your website is having a solid title for your page. The Title is what shows up on the search engine and is the main title that they will judge if it is reliant to their search. Having each page of your website with unique titles is important to your ranking and click through rate.

Another key is having a well structured website. What I mean by this is not so much the layout but the flow of your website website as a whole. You need to make sure everything in attached some how to your main page. If you have a page that is not linked to anywhere else on your website there is no way for the bot to even know it exist less you tell it (we will get in to that later). Think of your structure of your website as something link amazon.com they have categories for their products and under each category they have sub-categories. You should end up with a structure like a tree. One way to ensure this is by having a site map. A site map helps both users and bots find all your pages on your website ensuring that they are there.

Using keywords in your text that you want to show up as your site as a whole. For instance if your website is a weight loss website it is important to have the keywords weight, loss, and weight loss all on your website. Mix these key words into articles, meta tags, alt tags, etc. Keywords are important to search query as it makes your website more reliant.

Read more basic how to at the following:
Google.com SEO Guide
http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/

Linking

Believe it or not external linking plays a major part in how your site is ranked. Though do not go out and just join a linking site where you share your links with other random websites. This does not help your ranking. If you join a linking site this can damage your ranking more than it can help it. Search engines like Google penalize sites that try to game their search engine results by using that method. The key is having links to your page about relevant content. So get active on other competitor websites and make sure that your commenting with links back to your site. Make your comments relevant to both your article that your linking to and the article on the page.

Key to external links is social links. Search engines are in love with social links. If you get linked on Twitter or Facebook or the likes of those this helps your article content be pushed up in search engine results. This is because search engines want to be relevant in what is happening in the social world so they can stay on top of things. If you notice Google is changing the way their website shows search results. They have basically pushed the old search results to the bottom half of the page and now their Google+ links are now on top. Most viewers don't scroll down and almost none go to the second page on Google. So being active on sites like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter are must if you want to rank your site high in search results.

What Not To Do:

Do not brake the rules. The major search engines out there have smart bots. So don't write random keywords in a div then try to hide it or make it 1px. These type of SEO will risk your site being black listed from many of the large search engines. These techniques are used by site that don't have much to loss sense they are generally doing illegal things in the first place.

Don't get obsessed with your page rank. Just work at your content and your socializing and it will help push up your page rank naturally.

Tools and Books

Here are some required tools you need to use. These tools will help keep track of your key words, query results, click through rate, sitemaps, and submitting your website to the search engine.
Webmaster Tools by Google
Webmaster Tools by Bing

If your needing more reading on this topic check out some of these books.


Art of SEO

When Search Meets Web Usability

SEO Warrior 

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
-Local Tech Repair Admin