Everyone wants to bring the traffic to the website they launch. Often our marketing skills will decide if the service we provide is going to successful one or a total disaster and waste of time. This article highlights the most important techniques of search engine optimisation (SEO) – basics. This is the cheapest marketing strategy of all and the basics can be done without a big effort.
Introduction
The most important strategy to promote your website is to optimize it in order to rank high on search engine results. If your website is high up in the search results, you are most likely to get visitors to visit your website or buy your products or services. Important is to not use any hacks or tweaks because in the long term run it can just hurt your reputation and your website can be banned from the search results.
Keyword Selection analysis
First you have to decide what keywords you target. Sometimes it´s good to choose a keyword that have less popularity because it mean you will have a low competition. This has to be balanced. So don´t target keywords that have plenty of results like: ‘web design´ or ‘web design company´. It is just extremely hard to get to the top when you could target your business for a keywords that are still very good and you have got less competition to 'fight' with. It is a good practice to select 4–8 keywords that you target.
Meta tags as your identity in a search results
Your Titile selection
Remember to create the <title> tag as a fist thing in your <head> tag. The title tag should contain the keywords but it have to be user friendly as well. It means that the visitors seeing in on Google results should find it interesting and not confusing. I would not advise you to put here a brand name unless you are well known, because people will be not searching for unknown brand. That´s obvious. Avoid ´filler´ words (things like ´and´, ´or´ as much as possible) Tip: Short and strait to the point describing your service (containing keyword/s)
Description tag
Description tag is as well very important because that´s what the search engine result will display describing your services (website). I don´t have to mention again that it have to (should be) rich with keywords. What I want to highlight here that the description should be the description. One or two sentences describing your services should be just fine. Take to account a keywords and a human aspect (encourage people to visit your website, this is your identity) and avoid ´filler´ words (´or´, ´such us´, ´and´). Up to 250 letters it´s just fine.
keywords tag
Keywords tag is important as well. Google is not taking it into account giving you the rank and there is no impact on the search results here but this is a good practice as some of the search engines might take it to account and that describes the content of your website as well. Up to 8 keywords its optimum.
It is not advised to use keywords that will not appear on your website content. Search Engines might penalize that.
Website content rich with keywords
One you have got your keywords create a website and make the content reach with the keywords. The URL you use has a big impact on the search results. If your business is not branded yet you could consider finding the domain name that contains the keywords you selected. As your website is getting busy you can then think about branding.
A very important part on the content are the headers (h1, h2 ,h3… tags) and they have to be rich with the keywords, as well as a pictures on your site. Remember to use alt tags everywhere where possible. Don´t forget to use keywords in your anchor tags as a link, not only as an alt tag. It is a good practice to remember about the images - alt tags. If it comes to navigation remember that search engine robots don´t read css or java script or flash. Make your navigation robots friendly using keywords as anchor tags, not forgetting about alt tags here as well.
Don´t overdo it. The best practice is to dedicate one page for one keyword. Develop a several web pages on your site, each of which is focused on a different targeted keyword.
Home page importance
This is going to be a main site scrawled by search engine spiders. Make sure you have got a relevant content on the home page and the content contains the keywords. The content of the page decides the most if you ‘score´ well in a search results. Don´t ignore it.
Friendly URLs to scan through
If you have got a dynamic website it is advised to use URL rewriting. Sometimes search engines will refuse to scan your website and may stop at the question mark. You would like to avoid that basically.
Create a Site Map
This is like a list of contents that links all your sub pages together and it can help search engines to find all your pages. It can be useful for your visitors too if you have got a larger website. Submit XML version of the sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Conclusion
This is just a basic guide and you should be aware that SEO always changes. What is relevant today might be not so useful and good the next month. This is just a pattern. You can compare search engine optimisation to the living organism. Grows, changes, adapts! Don´t forget to leave a comment.
