Search Engine Optimization
Here are a few tips for Search Engine Optimization
1.Monitor your rankings, you won’t know if your Search Engine Optimization efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings.
2. The text you put on your Website should be for humans to read. The search engines are smart. They know what links are, and what a real sentence should look like. Don’t fill your site with the same keywords over and over or talk about the same things over and over to try to beat the search engines.
3. Keywords in your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Use your best keywords in your domain and page names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it? Focus on 5-20 main related keywords or phrases for your entire Website. If you spread yourself too thin you won’t rank well for any search terms. Try to “own” the search for a select number of terms.
4. Keywords and phrases for a page should be around 3-5 percent of the total text and links of any particular page (not too much more and not too much less). Don’t just focus on your homepage. It’s about 50 percent of the search weight of your Website but every page needs keywords to create a “theme” for search engines. The more pages that are ranked, the more entry points your Website has. Check your keyword density and tweak as necessary.
5. Make sure the title of each page is different. Mix up your keyword combinations and phrases and don’t use more than 70 characters for your title. The first words in the title matter most.
6. Name your Images. Get keywords and phrases into the file names and use them in alt tags, too. For example: milgard-vinyl-window.jpg with an alt tag of “Milgard Vinyl Window.”
7. Link back to yourself with internal links into your site. This is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages.
8. Create an XML Sitemap. Search engines love them. You can build a quick sitemap for your Website using XML Sitemaps Generator. A site map is a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site. This makes it easier for search engine spiders to search your site.
9. Link out. Search engines give more importance to Websites that link to other related sites, especially if they’re local to your city or state, or industry. Create a “Resources” page with keyword-rich links out to other sites.
10. Refresh your Website with new content and pages regularly. One easy way to do it: Find related subject RSS feeds and add a couple to your Website too.
11. Get listed in directories. They have been around a long time and search engines scan them for new links because of their reputation. Try DMOZ and Google Directory.
12. List yourself on Google Places. This means your business will show up as a Google map search result and it carries a lot of weight for local searches.
13. Flash might look pretty, but it does nothing for your SEO. “If you absolutely MUST have flash on your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.”
14. An SEO blog is just one element of social media distribution. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms.
Getting a higher search engine rank will always be about compelling products and information that is spread by word of mouth. No one knows for sure what the exact formula is to getting a better ranking except the hundreds of Ph.Ds that work at Google.
A strong foundation of great products and quality keywords and links is always the best place to start and build search engine optimization into your website.
For your free 1 hour Search Engine Optimization consultation call “Knaus Consulting” at 1-209-566-2452 or email us at: knausconsulting@gmail.com
