Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the ranking of a website in search engines via the "natural" — or un-paid, "organic", "algorithmic" — search results. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page) and the more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. Over 70% (in 2011) of visits on the web come via search engines.
SEO may target different kinds of search, including keyword search (the main area of focus), image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Optimizing a website firstly involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Keyword research is perhaps the most important element, as the targeted keywords will indicate which content to place on any page of the website, with the intention to get good rankings in search engines.
Determine the most important keywords (or set of keywords, expressions) for which you want your website to appear on search results pages, or which you think that your prospective customers will search for.
This requires knowledge of the business and of the target audience, but also of those keywords' search volume on search engines. The issue is that the more popular the term is, the more competition there will be for the ranking on search results pages!
To find out the popularity of the keywords, you can use the Google Keyword Tool (accessible when you create a free Google AdWords account), so as to find out an estimated search volume of terms over the last month.
The idea here is to get your website to rank higher on keywords that are relevant to your business, but that are not necessarily the most searched or the most popular, as your website would be likely to have too much competition there.
For example, the keyword perfume was searched for a whopping 16.5 million times in the last month, and there were about 50 million search results for the same. So if you want to target that specific keyword, you will competing with too many websites for the ranking on search results.
So what is the solution here? Let's assume that perfumes by Giorgio Armani are one of the products sold on the website. In terms of keywords, Giorgio armani men's perfumes was searched about 15,000 times: relatively less as compared to perfume, but with considerably less competition (just about 500,000 as compared to 51 million). Now, this looks like a good keyword to target.
It can be called a long-tail keyword, where instead of using 1-2 word phrases, you try to go for longer, 4-5 word keywords as the competition grows.
Choosing long-tail keywords is extremely effective at gaining quick ranks and building up traffic over time. If you continue to focus on the long-tail keywords that include the long-term targets (e.g. perfumes), you will slowly build up your popularity and potentially start ranking for those as well.
What's more, the long-term (general / broad) keywords are certainly tempting due to the number of monthly searches, but in reality many of the visitors who searched for them are not ready to buy — contrary to long-tail searchers. Stick to the long tail!
The webpages' title is the very first thing that any search engine crawler will read and take as a factor to rank a website.
The homepage’s title should contain the main targeted keyword. All the other pages should have titles related to the content of that respective page.
The allocation of a relevant URL is also a key success factor; try and place as many keywords as possible. Ex: www.perfumes.com/giorgio-armani-men-perfumes.htm
Even though Google crawlers do not read meta tags content, it is still recommended to put one line description of your website as well as your targeted keywords in meta fields in the webpage's header, as many other search engines will still read them (and Google won’t penalise for doing that).
The proper syntax for these HTML tags is:
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your keyword rich marketing sales-pitch meta description goes here">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="your keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space">
The website's homepage should have a unique content describing the business. This introductory text should match the title of the page; this also applies to other pages.
Targeted keywords should be used 2-3 times in every 200 words, to avoid getting caught for "keyword stuffing".
Give an anatomy to the webpage by resorting to proper subheadings; it helps create a feel good factor for readers, and keyword-rich sub-headings also help in SEO. Use meaningful XHTML tags, in order for search engine crawlers (responsible for periodically referencing your website) to "understand" the logic of your code and improve your ranking. Whereas <span> and <div> do not mean anything in particular, <strong> and <h1> are crucial.
Take the time to research and attach useful links to research papers or related topics as this authenticates your article and reinforces the feel good factor.
Try and put your local business address and phone number on the home page & contact us page to get noticed on local business results.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
You can generate a sitemap easily in 4 steps at xml-sitemaps.com. Alternatively, you can build your own following these guidelines. (You will need to update the sitemap when you have new URLs.)
Once you have created the Sitemap file and placed it on your webserver, you need to inform the search engines that support this protocol of its location. You can do this by submitting it either via the search engine's submission interface (e.g. for Google, use their Webmaster tools) - which will enable you to receive status information -, by specifying the location in your site's robots.txt file (see here), or by sending an HTTP request to the search engine (see here).
The search engines will then retrieve your sitemap and make the URLs available to their crawlers.
More information on sitemaps: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php.
Search engines reference blogs really well — as well as the wider website hosting them (also because of traffic from blog-oriented search engines, retrolinks to the website, RSS feeds).
Put a link to the blog(s) on the website's homepage, to improve ranking.
See Why your business needs a blog.
Secondly, SEO encompasses the promotion of a website to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, since they account for a large part of Google's algorithm.
SEO, Social Media and PR converge. See Social Media Framework.
* * *
* * *
© 2012-2024 Droid Interface — All rights reserved |
|
