Search Engine Optimization - An Introduction
The 9 Simple Steps
1. Select Right Keywords
This is THE most important step and can easily be the reason for your ranking ahead or ranking below your watch sites (competition). Identify the words or phrases using which people search(might search) for your Web page on the Internet. If you sell dog food, your keywords must have something to do with "dog food". Do not use irrelevant keywords, even if they get you more traffic. If you are not sure of the keywords to be used, use any of the following tools to find good target phrases:
- Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity of target phrases.
- Googleis great for brainstorming target phrases.
- Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and compare how the competitors use the target phrase.
2. Analyze Competition
Determine who your competitors are. It is quite simple; search for the keyword on popular search engines. The sites that show up above your page are your competitors. Analyze those sites and find out how effectively they have used the targeted keywords. Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes, it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase.
Check out yours and your competitor's link popularity. In many engines, you can type: link:http://domain-name and get a link count for that particular site. The more the link count, the better.
3. Page Creation and Optimization
After identifying the keywords, create Web pages by targeting one word or phrase for each page. One common mistake most novice SEO's do is dump many keywords into a page. Not only does it make it difficult for you to rank high for each of those keywords, but also it makes the page less readable.
i) Make sure your keywords are present in the following places:
- Title tag
- META tags: Description tag and Keywords tag
- Body text: Heading tags, comment tags,alt tags and prominent places on the page content
ii) Conduct HTML validation for your Web pages. HTML validation helps you find out the errors in HTML code, which may prevent search engines from indexing your site.
iii)Then check and ensure that your pages are Spam-free. When your page elements, such as Title tag, META tag, and body text, are stuffed with repeated keywords, search engines may consider them Spam and ban your site.
4. Visual Review of Page
- Check whether your site has usable navigation.
- Ensure you have informative and readable content. Good content will ensure that your page appeals to human visitors as well as spiders.
A badly written page may get a good ranking on search engines, but visitors will move away from your site with the same speed they came in. Although Search engine spiders that grade your site will not look for visual appeal, directory editors and human visitors will!.
5.Link Building
Get inbound links from quality sites. Quality sites are those that rank high on search engines and/or have a good Google PageRank. If the sites are in someway connected with the theme of your webpage that will help increase your rank better. DO NOT turn to link farms for link building this can get your site banned in search engines.
6. Submitting to Search Engines
If you have followed steps one to five you are ready to submit your webpages to the search engines. Chances are the search engines found your webpages through the links that you built but if they some how missed your webpages don't worry you can always let them know that your pages exist through Search Engine Submission.
You can refer the below link for details on submission to search engines
Altavista
http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl
All The Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
MSN
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm
Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
7. Submitting to Directories
Search Engines consider Web Directories as expert documents. A presence in popular directories can help you get a better ranking on search engines. You can submit your site to popular directories, such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, and Microsoft bCentral. For more information on Web Directories and guidelines for submission.
8. Maintain
Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process. Popular Search Engines keep making changes to their algorithms i.e the way they rank webpages quite often. Thus it is imperative that you continually optimize your pages based on the current algorithms to achieve high ranks.
It's important to measure your rankings atleast monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank and then re-submit or wait for the search engine to revisit the page.
9. Tracking
Ultimately, it is not top rankings you are really after, but more traffic and sales. High traffic is not something that automatically follows top rankings. It is something you get by ranking high for "good keywords". Thus it is important that you track your website usage using a good log file analysis program and find out which keywords and which keywords bring in most visitors to your pages. Use this information to optimize your pages better for these terms and search engines.
At first glance, search engine optimization may look like magic; but actually all it takes is 9 simple steps. Search Engine Optimization is a simple continuous process that helps search engine do their job more efficiently. It does take a lot of time and patience but stay the course search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble.
If you follow all the above-listed steps, you will definitely see an improvement in the search engine rankings for your keywords. The best part is that you do not have to spend any money on the expensive search engine optimizers!
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