Wednesday 10 July 2013

How To Search Engine Optimize Your Website Before It's Too Late

By Sawyer Lunthmoreland


It's a jungle out there when it comes to rising up the ranks of the major search engines. Getting your site to show on even the 5th page of results requires a strong understanding of SEO principles and a determination to implement improvements. Here we'll go over a few of tricks to help you become king of the jungle.

To increase sales of your products from your website, hire a professional to create individualized product descriptions. Product descriptions can make or break a sale. The benefit you will gain from better product descriptions will more than outweigh the cost of hiring the writer to create them, and will also increase your search engine rankings.

Flash navigation might be pretty, but a search engine spider can't even see it. If you insist on having your navigation, or entire website, built in Flash, make sure you provide alternate HTML navigation somewhere on each page. Also, have HTML pages available so that the search engine can index them and give you a correct Page Rank.

Do not use 301 redirects on a page that no longer exists on your website. Instead, use a 401 Gone error page to indicate the page is well and truly gone from your website. A 301 redirect should only be used if the content has actually been moved to another page.

Be careful how often you use ALT and TITLE attributes on a page. If you have 14 images and very little text, the ALT and TITLE tags, full of keywords can appear to be overused and an attempt to game the system. Try to balance out, how often you use them against how much copy is on the actual page.

Make sure when writing a title for your blog post that you keep Search Engine Optimization in mind. If you are writing a post about visiting Japan, don't just title it, "Visiting Japan." Use something like "Traveling to Japan with three small children." You want to keep in mind the different keywords people might put into a search.

After you've run through your website with all the automated tools, it's time to do some manual inspections as well. Install the browsers that are likely to view your website and check it out in each. View it on a Mac and a PC, a laptop and a mobile phone. Don't forget a tablet or two! Don't forget to try different screen resolutions, too. There's no point in driving traffic to your site if they can't see it as it's intended!

If you want to be successful at SEO, make sure you know your audience! Use the Google Tracker application (or any other similar website) to break down where your website traffic is coming from. This will help reveal which of your SEO tactics are successful and which are not. When you are more pragmatic about generating visitors for your website, you will get better results.

Catalog all the changes you're making to your site to track how your SEO is doing. Keep a log in a Notepad file or Word, listing the changes you made and the date you changed it on. That way you can compare it to your statistics and see if your changes were good or harmful to your audience.

Check how many inbound links you have for all the major keywords for your website, and then ensure that the number is high for each. Focus on the top keywords which you believe are driving the highest number of turnover traffic to your website, then focus on the keywords that have the least number of links using them as anchor text.

Make sure that the sites you link to are of high quality. Search engines judge you not only on your inbound links, but also on your outbound links. If you're linking to spam sites, or sites that are considered less than page rank worthy, it could drag your rank down with it.

Search engine optimization should be a priority for your business. In order to do well, especially if you have a lot of competitors, your website needs to rank highly in the search engines. Use the tips here to optimize and organize your website so that it is useful to people and so that search engines rank it highly.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment