Search engine optimization seems difficult
to many but with a little patience and work it’s really
not that hard to pick up. In doing so you can save hundreds
of dollars, and get the same results as the professionals do.
You will probably get better results from highly qualified
professionals, but you should definitely perform these do-it-yourself
actions first. Once you’ve done some of this kind of
work it will be easier to determine if a professional is worth
his/her salt.
Basic SEO is very simple and easy – all it takes is
the willingness to put in the work. Once you know the ropes,
it’s not that difficult though it can be time consuming.
The content of your website the focus of what SEO is all
about. Here are the top points to think about when you’re
doing it yourself.
1. You will start by registering a domain name,
which should reflect what your site about. Keep it short,
as long as it’s somehow related to your site. Being
more specific can help. You could choose to name the page
after one of your products or services, for example. Another
method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will
generally help you get indexed more quickly though it will
not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There
is a trade of here, sub domains are quicker (and generally
cheaper), but domain names are more memorable, and, in the
long run, better for your indexing.
2. The next thing you should look at is your page’s
title (i.e. the HTML title tag), which is critical
in letting search engines see what the page is about, and
is the first item looked at by search engines to determine
your relevance. You should put your most important keywords
in your title tags – you don’t need to worry
about singular or plural forms as search engines account
for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, don't
call your home page ‘Home’ – make the
title a mini-description of the page.
3. The two primary meta tags aren’t as important
as they used to be, but the description tag is
still used by some search engines to display information
about your website to users and help them decide whether
they’ve found what they are looking for. Not all
search engines bother with this, though most will put some
bearing on it (even if it is minuscule).
For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt
tags let you describe an image or graphic file – they’re
the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse
over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded
for whatever reason.
Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page – it
is used by coders and designers to remind them of what that
part of the page is for. Some coders used to put lots of
keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be seen
by search engines but not users, but search engines have
now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t
seen by the user. Keep this in mind when trying to post invisible
text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of
behavior can get you banned from a search engine.
4. Having keyword density in all of your content
is good, but keep in mind that each search engine
has its own requirements when it comes to how many times
that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the
page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent
is a roughly optimal level – but this isn’t
always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t
overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down.
5. Many search engines judge web page importance
on the number and quality of incoming links from other
sites. You should link to some related sites,
but not too many. Don’t overdo incoming links either,
and keep them related your site’s content. It’s
also good to get sites to use your keywords as the text
of these links.
Using the above advice will see you gaining some very good
first page rankings, it just takes a little effort and work!
Chris Taylor – CEO Catdynamics, author, marketing & SEO
Specialist.
Search
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