SE0 Basics 101 - Website Optimization
Following SEO basics, and by fully optimizing your website for Google, Yahoo and other major search engines, your website can achieve significantly high rankings for specific keywords that are related to your niche market. The result of this is better traffic for your site; targeted, organic traffic from search engines which will boost your site’s credibility. Search engine optimization is not that hard to implement. However, you have to optimize every page of your website for search engines, not just the main landing page.
Search engines find websites and connect them to users’ queries by looking at a website’s keyword swipe file. This contains all the relevant keywords that your target audience may be using to find you on search engines. As a webmaster, you must use these keywords by integrating them into the structure and content of your site. In order to do so, you must evaluate certain keywords using an online keyword research tool such as Wordtracker.com or Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.
The keyword swipe file you create for your site should contain all possible terms that are related to your overall market. These terms should be ones that will most likely attract the most relevants leads and visitors to your site. Since quality always presides over quantity when it comes to integrating keywords into a site, you must first build up keyword lists of relevant, qualified search terms that generate traffic consistently, but are not vastly competitive. Targeting long-tail keyword phrases is one way to do this, being that they are easier to rank for than mainstream words and are more affordable when you’re dealing with pay per click marketing efforts.
There are other aspects which are critical to search engine optimization, all of which must be given prime importance. These are:
Title Tags
The content of your website is one of the first things that search engine crawlers look for. They pick these up from the title tags that describe each page on your site. These title tags must include your primary keyword phrase, but they should vary from page to page throughout your site so that you can rank for more keywords.
For example: Avoid calling your home page "Home," and instead add a title that clearly describes the content of that particular webpage. If your home page offers content on gardening tools, let your title tag read "The Top 5 Essential Gardening Tools." In your other title tags, use titles that are structured in a similar manner, focusing always on incorporating your site’s primary keyword phrases.
Header Tags
These are the h1 and h2 tags which flag a site as "important" or "hot" to human visitors as well as search engine crawlers. The header tags are bold, enlarged text which are based on and contain keywords, and these help your website gain position in the search engines.
Site Map
A site map helps search engine spiders spot the content and theming of your website, and also lets them weave through the site’s subpages. Online resources such as SiteMapDoc.com or XML-SiteMaps.com can help you create site maps quickly. Note that when you submit your completed site map, you must update it with new links each time you re-submit it.
Consider search engine optimization upon registering for your website’s domain name. When you do, incorporate the primary keywords into the URL you will actually use. Doing so will significantly impact your relevancy on major search engines every time someone searches using those keywords or keyword phrases.
