Introduction
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an online marketing
strategy used to increase a Web site's visibility to the
millions of people who find information and services on the
Internet. Search engine optimization can help position your
firm among the top search results for a given query, which
can dramatically increase traffic to your Web site and establish
a Web presence for your practice. Among other things, SEO
involves optimizing the structure of your site and the text
that appears on it, as well as obtaining links to your site
from other sites, to help its popularity rating with search
engines. With the number of Web sites on the Internet increasing
at an exponential rate, gaining primary placements in search
engine rankings allows you to market your law firm in a very
powerful and effective way.
Page Rank
PageRank is in some ways related to link popularity, but
the calculation is dependant on the quality and strength
of the links, not just the number of links. So, how does
one go about building and increasing their Page Rank. It
is not as difficult as some may think.
Internal linking : also plays a factor in the Page Rank of
the pages within a site. The linking structure within the
site should follow the themed approach to internal linking,
which stresses importance on minimizing linking between 2nd
and 3rd level directories and pages. Since the internal linking
of your site plays a factor, not in increasing PR, but in
sharing the PR of the site, and the dilution of your keyword
strength and theme, it is important to review the internal
linking structure of your site. Then there are modifications
that could be made to improve the site's internal linking.
External linking is the largest factor in determining PageRank,
and is the place where you have the least control. There
is no way to force another web master to link to your site,
especially when they already have a high PageRank. For this
reason and many more, increasing your PageRank is difficult,
but important nonetheless. When contacting other websites
to link to your site in the attempt to build and increase
your Page Rank, these web pages that you are requesting a
link from should be relevant and of the same theme and market
of the page that you are requesting they link to. Perform
a search for your target keyword in Google, ODP, and Yahoo
to start, and check the top 40 ranking sites. contact them
and request that they link to your site. Be prepared for
them to ask for a reciprocal link.
Your site and pages within your site must meet certain criteria
for this to work, with one piece being the most important:
the site and pages within your site must be quality content
that people will actually want to link up to. This is one
of the basic points of PageRank: Google can tell which pages
and sites are authorities as they have a large number of
high quality links pointing them.
Components:
There are three major components of search engine optimization
that you should keep in mind and incorporate into any design,
written Web page content, coded HTML, and programming scripts
for your site.
1. Keywords and Phrases –
To optimize your site, you must strategically select and
place words or phrases into your Web page content and specific
HTML tags - the areas from which search engines grab words
and phrases to build their indices. If you want your target
audience to find your site through a search engine, your
Web pages must contain keywords or keyword phrases that match
the search queries of your target audience. Often, there
are multiple words or phrases that mean the same thing. From
an SEO standpoint, it is important to include all the words
or phrases your target audience may use in their searches.
The closer the match between your Web site's content's keywords
and phrases with those terms, the higher you will be ranked
in a result set.
2. Web Site Structure and Page Layout –
The way you structure your site and design your Web page
layout will have a large impact on your site's search engine
ranking. This includes how you serve your Web pages (e.g.,
as static HTML or XHTML pages or dynamically from a database
or Web script), the directory structure of your site, the
names of your site's directories and individual HTML or XHTML
files, and the URLs you choose when selecting your domain
names. Also, each Web page on your site needs to be optimized
individually to most effectively present the content it contains
to the search engines. Thus, the elements of a page's layout,
including navigation, site maps, graphics and multimedia
elements such as Flash and QuickTime movies, need to be placed
correctly on every Web page. Using W3C Web standards such
as XHTML and CSS can allow you to place unique content for
a given page above its navigational elements, while at the
same time reducing the file size of these Web pages. Other
factors that affect a Web site's ability to be successfully
indexed are the use (and sometimes non-use) of Image Maps,
Frames, JavaScript and, most importantly, your Web page title
tags.
3. Web Pages Popularity –
Putting up a Web site is not enough to market your company
competitively on the Internet. For your target audience to
find you, your Web site needs to be found easily by search
engine spiders/crawlers and then to be ranked well in search
engine results sets for the keywords and phrases you have
selected and placed in the content of your Web site.
Conclusion
The process of SEO is not easy to tackle, largely because
so many pieces of a site factor into the final results.
Promoting a site that writers on the web are unlikely to
link to is as deadly as creating a fantastic website no
one will see. SEO is also a long-term process, both in
application and results - those who expect quick rankings
after completing a few suggestions in this guide will be
deeply disappointed. Search engines can often be frustratingly
slow to respond to improvements that will eventually garner
significant boosts in traffic.
To make your site the best site's adhere strictly to these
guidelines:
1. Unique Content -
2. Access to an Adoptive Community -
3. Link-Friendly Formatting -
4. Monetization Plan -
5. Market Awareness -
Author:
Harish co-founded Varshyl Tech in 2005. As director of operations,
he oversees the company’s daily operations and develops
the strategy for product direction and new product development.
Harish has more than five years of experience delivering mission-critical
enterprise software solutions for diverse applications such
as supply chain management and corporate information delivery
systems. Prior to co-founding Varshyl Tech, he was a program
analyst with Infosys Technologies Ltd., and also worked as
software developer and testing engineer for Microsoft Projects.
Harish has significant experience working with Mainframe technology
and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering
from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka, India.
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