Access to your website is primarily through the search engines. Therefore, your site needs to be found by the top search engines such as Yahoo and Google. These search engines can be your best ally in generating Internet traffic. As well as leading to more sales, it provides free advertisement of your business or service.
Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, is the technique of making your website rank highly in search engine databases according to the relevance to the user’s search. To be rank highly with search engines, you need to have articles and keywords based on the words that users look for on the search engines.
It is important to submit your site to the main search engines. When you do this, you need to use optimised keywords to increase your ranking. This is particularly so in a highly competitive industry. By doing so, you will attract more potential buyers to your site.
When optimising your website, it pays to bear in mind that text is what the search engines take notice of, not graphics. It is therefore imperative that you have good written content on your site and that your graphics are properly labeled with hyphenated words not numbers and meaningless letters. You must also use the alt=”" tag to provide a textual description of your images.
One area of focus is the text on your home page as this is the first thing search engines read. In the opening paragraph, use as many keywords and key phrases as possible. Also, your website ranking will be better if your HTML tags are consistent with your text.
Do some research to find the right search engine for your business needs but certainly don’t overlook the big three, which are Google, Yahoo, and Bing (Formerly MSN). These will be crucial to your marketing efforts.
To give more chance of potential customers finding you easily, you should register your website with as many search engines as you can.
Search engines use a program called a spider that crawls the Internet and looks for web pages to visit and add to their database. If you overuse keywords, this spider may bypass your site and it won’t be included in search results. It is known as keyword spamming so it is important to get the balance right.
Posting on blogs and forums is a good way to get listed with search engines quickly. You’ll be listed even more quickly when the blog or forum has a high page rank. Webmaster forums usually offer a board for webmasters to spam their sites; the sole purpose being to help sites get listed in search engines. When posting a link to your website make sure the anchor text (the clickable text) is a keyword or phrase that relates to your site.
Use the title, keywords and description meta tags in the header of your web pages. The title tag should be several words (3 or 4) that relate to the page, the keywords should be the most repeated words in the page (separated by a coma and a space), and the description should be about 250 characters of text that describe the page’s content.
Some websites also don’t use their listed keywords in their content and therefore the spider doesn’t acknowledge it. This means your web page won’t be indexed. It is therefore a waste of your time coming up with lots of irrelevant keywords just to have your website overlooked by the search engines. Remember, keep it relevant to what your site is about.
You should also create a site map for your website and search engine. Keep the site-map up-to-date and ping (call) the search engines whenever you update it. This way they’ll send their spiders to crawl your pages more frequently. If you use a content management system like WordPress, Joomla or SMF then you can use a plug-in to create and auto-update your site map then auto ping the search engines .
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