Get Your Website Seen By The Search Engines

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process used to get higher search engine results. It involves optimising a website so it is 'search engine friendly', which means it is easy for the search engines to crawl, and building it's popularity, so that search engines rank it higher than competing websites.

SEO can be broken down into five steps:


Step 1 Keyword Research

Keyword research means working out what people are searching for that relates to your site. What are people actually typing into search engines to find what you offer?

You want to target phrases that are going to send lots of quality traffic to your website, traffic that will convert into sales and clients, traffic relevant to what your site offers.

Build up a list of possible phrases any way you can, search yourself, look at other websites, ask customers and friends, look in printed and online directories. Once you have a list, you need to find out if, and how many, people actually search for them. Are they worth targeting?

There are a variety of online tools which can help with this. One good free one is provided by Wordtracker: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

Step 2 Get Your Keywords In the Right Places

Armed with the right keywords, you are ready for ‘on-site’ or ‘on-page’ optimisation - repeating keywords in the right places within your web pages.

Although the whole of a web page is analysed by a search engine to work out what it is about and it's relevance to the phrases people type into search engines, certain parts of a page are more important. These areas are listed below.

* The title meta tag.
* The content on the page.
* The anchor text of internal links.
* The anchor text of external links.
* The description meta tag.
* The alt tags of images.
* The H1 tag.
* The filenames of pages.
* The filenames of images.
* The title tags of links.

It is worth remembering though, that no one knows exactly how search engines rank web pages.

Step 3 Search Engine Submission

So you have completed the on-site optimisation of your site - how are the search engines going to find it?

There are two ways search engines find new sites, through sites being submitted to them and by following links from other sites.

Search engines usually have a form you can fill in to submit a site, (here is Google’s: http://www.google.com/addurl/) however, hundreds of search engines are available so an automatic submission tool really helps.

Try searching for 'free search engines submission' and you will find a multitude of free online tools. If you are going to be repeatedly submitting your site or several site, you might want to invest in some submission software.

Step 4 Link Building

Link building is the most important factor in attaining higher search engine rankings. Search engines interpret a link from one website to another as a ‘vote’ for the site pointed at by the link, so the more links you can get to your website, the better.

However, quality is just as important as the quantity of links. A link from a page or, even better, a whole site about the same subject as yours carries more weight.

Some of the main ways you can get links to your site are:

* Buying links.
* Submitting your site to free web directories.
* Exchanging links with other websites with similar or related content (reciprocal linking).
* Writing and submitting articles.

The text of the links pointing to a site (the anchor text) is also important. If the anchor text includes your targeted keywords, the link is an even better ‘vote’ for your site.

The best (and cheapest) way to get links to your site is to create great content that other sites will want to link to. These natural links are the ones that search engines like Google give the most weight.

Step 5 Monitoring Your SEO Efforts

Once you have optimised your website, it is important to monitor how well it is ranking in the search engines for your chosen keywords. Do you need to adjust the titles of your pages, add more content, or build more links?

A site's rankings can be checked by typing the keywords you are targeting into search engines and manually seeing where it ranks. However, for multiple keywords and sites this is very laborious. It's much more efficient to use online tools or special software to check many keywords on several different search engines at the same time.

Digital Point provide an online keyword tracker tool: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/

It is also important to check your website statistics to see how many visitors are coming to your site, what search phrases they have used and which search engines they have come from.

Remember that your competitors are going to be optimising their sites and trying to improve their search engine positions. Even if you achieve a high ranking for your site, the SEO work doesn’t stop there. You need to continually monitor your rankings, build links and add content to maintain a top position.

By: Free DIY SEO

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Find more free SEO advice and help at www.freediyseo.co.uk/. The site includes a blog and SEO resource directory to help you optimise your site for higher search engine rankings.

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