Getting your website to the top of the most popular search engines like Google can be somewhat of a black art involving techniques such as page optimization, in-bound link building and article submission techniques.
Whilst many of these strategies can involve specialist knowledge and a good dose of persistence, there are a number of techniques that you can do yourself either in their entirety or in association with the developers of your website.
1. Correctly Format your Meta Tags
Meta Tags is the hidden code that appears at the top of each page on your website. To see this code, if you use Internet Exporer 7 as your browser, go to VIEW >> SOURCE in the menu bar (you may need to reveal the menu bar in IE7 by tapping the ‘ALT’ key on your keyboard).
The Meta Tags, including your Title Tag, Description Tag, and Keywords Tag, are important for classifying your web page and communicating to the major search engines like Google the content of your page. Whilst Meta Tags are not as important as they once were, they are used for many purposes including how your listing appears in search engine results lists and as such, it is worth paying attention to them, particularly the Title Tag.
More information on writing Meta Tags may be found at www.webworksite.com/meta-tags.shtml
Remember to write unique Meta Tags for each page on your website, ensuring that the keywords and phrases you use are applicable to the subject matter of your web page.
2. Improve Your Keyword Density
The big search engines in particular Google, love text content on a page as this helps them determine the relevancy and subject matter of the page whilst also giving them something worthwhile to index and catalogue. Being able to do this helps them keep their search results fresh and relevant to their users.
Therefore it makes sense to give Google something to index. This can be done by putting plenty of web copy on the pages of your site. However, don’t just put any old blurb. Make the text so it makes sense to humans and pay attention to the density of keywords within the text. Do not simply list strings of keywords on your page. This technique is called keyword stuffing and will result in your site being penalised by Google if you use the technique.
Keyword density is the ratio of keywords or phrases in relation to the total number of words on the page. Getting the keyword density right within the text you use on each page improves it’s relevancy in the eyes of the search engines, which in turn pushes up your site’s pages within their results.
More information on writing and measuring keyword density on your website pages may be found in this article www.addme.com/newsletters/issue279.htm
3. Format Your Pages Correctly
Search engines look at the HTML used on your web pages. So anything you can do to make their life easier will help your web pages in their rankings. Using H1 and H2, H3 etc style-tags to define the structure of your page text (such style tags are used to define the level of individual subject headings with your web-copy) is good HTML practice and as such, will be favoured by the search engine spiders.
Learn more about paragraph style tags here webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/a/headings_struct.htm
You may need the help of your website’s developer on this matter if you’re unfamiliar with the workings of HTML or the code used to build your website.
4. Generate Links to Your Website
One technique that will dramatically improve the ranking of your site within the results of Google is the number of good quality links from 3rd party websites that link back to your own site. Google sees these links as ‘votes’ for your site. The more ‘votes’ it gets, the more important it considers your page to be in association with the subject matter on the page. In turn, as the number of good-quality links to your site grows, Google perceives the authoritative value of your site to be high and as result it pushes your pages up its SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
Getting in-bound links to your site can be a time consuming task. However, as a starter consider getting links to your site from the following types of web sites. Some of these may require you to create a User account or pay a subscription. On the whole though, if you’re serious about promoting your website in the search engines, the cost and time invested is often worth the effort.
- Web directories such as Yahoo! Directory, DMoz, Applegate, Brownbook etc
- Social Book Marking sites such as Reddit, Digg or Del.icio.us
- The websites of your customers and associates.
- Contribute or comment upon articles within blogs and message boards and place a link back to your site within either your comment or signature.
- Create an account with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn etc.
Once created, place a link to your website with your profile text and within any postings you make on these sites.
The techniques described in this article aren’t exhaustive and there are plenty of other strategies and techniques that will help promote your site. However the ones described should be sufficient to get you started in the world of search engine optimization for your site.
Once you’re into the process if you need assistance or would like to implement a formal search engine promotional campaign for your site, give us a call and talk to us about search engine optimization.
