Search engine optimization (SEO) is not a short-term project. In order to do it effectively, you have to stay current with technology and any newly developed methods and constantly keep one step ahead of your competitors. This article discusses five basic SEO Steps to make your website a success.
Use titles with keywords that draw in your readers. Your titles should be compelling and use keywords that visitors are likely to enter into a search engine when trying to locate your business or product. Search engines give more weight to the words in your titles, which are often part of the article URL, as well. Spend some time strategically planning your titles around keywords that are relevant yet not highly competitive, and it will be time well spent. Google offers a free keyword tool in its Adwords program, but you can find other free keyword research tools online, too.
Be friendly to the spiders. You might not like them crawling around your home, but your site is one place that you want to make inviting and comfortable for web crawlers. Search engines send spiders out into the online world constantly to look for new information, and you want them to find yours easily and quickly. Below are a couple of things that you can do to help them achieve that goal.
Put your most important information at the beginning of your articles. The spiders deem earlier content as more worthy of their attention than content that is farther down on the page.
Use headers. Header text also gets priority treatment from search engine spiders. Headers that match meta-tags are another big plus.
Submit any new sites that you create to the search engine directories. These days, many folks view this as a waste of time because it generates little traffic. However, it has other benefits, such as providing valuable backlinks from high-ranking sites.
Directory submissions also help search engines to get the gist of your website so that they can deliver relevant results to their users. Google and Yahoo are two of the directories that you definitely want to include links to your sites, but you should submit your site to as many directories as you can over time.
Strive to get Backlinks from sites that are thought of highly by the search engines. It’s no secret that the page rank of the sites that link to your site plays an important role in determining how your site is perceived online, but the type of website that links to yours can also play a part.
Getting links from authority sites such as Wikipedia or those with an extension of .edu or .gov can boost your rankings. Be careful here, though. You don’t want to drop links on pages that are completely irrelevant to your site, or it could be seen as spam. Keep the topics relevant.
Put into practice what you’ve learned here, and get ready for an increase in traffic. It may not happen right away, but as long as you keep learning new ways to improve and keep working hard, your website can enjoy the high rankings and visibility of the big online players. Remember, good SEO is only half the battle!
