How to Optimize Your Website
Analyze and study your website., Determine your competition's website., Include meta and title tags., Research keywords., Place keywords strategically throughout your content., Use alt tags to describe your images., Develop some base traffic...
Step-by-Step Guide
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Step 1: Analyze and study your website.
The first and one of the most important steps to SEO is to analyze your website to determine what changes, if necessary, should be made.
This process includes assessing the site navigation, context, and overall cosmetics of the website.
It is a good practice to develop a task sheet to better proceed with the optimization of the website.
Focus on the individual goals and objectives that are trying to be accomplished and use these as a means of providing the most sufficient results.
Meaning – if you have a site that specializes in sales of sports memorabilia, your content should be relevant and revolve around information pertinent to sports memorabilia, not some off topic content such as baseball records.
Search engines look at domain names, title tags, and header tags to assist them in ranking the website according to relevance.
It is important to maintain consistency in text with the subject of your site. , By knowing your competition in the industry, you will gain a better understanding of what exactly needs to be accomplished.
It is helpful to find the top 5-10 competitors in your industry and find out what methods they are employing (they are at the top of the search engines aren’t they?).
This process also helps with generating valuable keywords for your website.
If you have a site promoting “cheap football tickets” it might be a good idea to go after “discount football tickets” versus “cheap football tickets”.
Not only will the keywords be more geared towards your site's intentions, but they will also bring in more relevant traffic to the site if ranked high enough in the search engines.
Relevant traffic = Return on Investment (ROI)., HTML's meta tag does not alter the content visible on the website; they exist only for search engines and other bots.
Place a title tag at the top of each page to identify the document's overall content.
Write an accurate meta description tag, since it is often used by search engines to describe a site in search results.
Add a meta keyword tag as well to reveal the most important keywords for each page to search engine bots.
Note that Google's search bots do not look at meta keywords, but other search engines may.
Meta tags, however, are not the end all solution to search engine optimization.
They are critical in helping the spiders index the pages – that is, for the search engines that still support them, but will still not skyrocket your rankings to the top of the search engines.
Make sure your keywords are relevant to what is on the page.
If there is no mention of “Golf Clubs” on that page, it makes no sense to include those words in your website.
Keep the description tag brief and to the point.
Avoid non-indexable words such as where, too, and etc.
Incorporating some keywords in the description is often helpful as long as it makes sense.
The more descriptive the tag is towards the content, the better your site will fare in the rankings. , Identify keywords related to your site's content.
These can be popular search terms that lead people to your site, words related to your overall topic, and the topic of a specific page or blog post.
If you're not sure which keywords are popular search terms, there are services online that can help you evaluate keywords, many of them with free trials.
Try KeywordSpy or WordTracker.
Create a spreadsheet and start listing as many words as possible relating to your website.
Focus on every little product, every subject that encompasses the concept of the website.
It is not uncommon for your list to reach close to or over 1000 keywords here.
Once you are finished, sort the list by alphabetizing and removing the duplicate words.
Then single out the words that are the most descriptive of your site.
You will now need to find and use a word tracker program to help analyze the keywords and determine how many times those words are searched for in a day (there are many tools freely available via Google).
This process will help you find the most popular keywords that are relevant to the content of your site. , Having keyword-rich content is the key to performing well with search engines.
Some search engine bots may penalize you for keyword spamming, however, so learn where to focus your efforts:
Use the keywords liberally on your home page.
Include keywords in header tags, title tags, and meta tags.
Include keywords in the anchor text used to describe links.
Use keywords in the URL of new pages. , This makes them searchable by search engine bots, which cannot otherwise detect what is in your images.
If you can, include a keyword or two in these descriptions, but keep the description accurate. , These reports are used to determine the current traffic to your website to see what kind of activity is taking place, where your traffic is coming from, and what pages are the most popular on your website as well as how they currently rank.
If you are not already monitoring your web traffic you will want to do this for at least a month to get a feel for your current volume.
Statcounter is good for monitoring.This step is crucial in the SEO process because these reports will also be used to gauge previous activity to your optimized performance., It should include several variations of web pages, and may also require the modification of some of the content and code.
You will want to create a site map, and incorporate a search engine as well as adding a forum or a blog, a resources page, etc.
All of this plays an important role in Search Engine Optimization and assists in satisfying the likes of the popular search engines., Good Web content is a critical factor in keeping site visitors interested and coming back for more.
This in turn will lead to higher search engine rankings.
When writing new content, keep in mind that each page should have at least 250 words. , Building good incoming or back links can also increase your search engine ranking and website traffic.
List your website in relevant directories and forums, and ask websites on similar topics to link to content on your website.
Most major search engines rank web pages based partially on the number and the quality of links that point to the site. , Site maps are XML files that list every URL in your website.
Your web host may provide this file, or you may have to make it yourself.
Find an example site map file and replace the example URLs with URLs of pages on your website.
Once every page is listed, upload it to the root folder of your web server.
Submit the link to this site map to Google and other major search engines.
Search online for "submit a sitemap" to find sites where you can submit your link.
You may also hire a service to make a sitemap for you. , Frames, which are being used less and less, enable you to split a page into pieces and section off static content to decrease download times.
However, using frames can prevent search engine bots from accessing your entire website.
Providing a site map may mitigate this problem. , While search engines don't care whether your HTML code is error-free, they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out which portions of your web page to index.
If your HTML code contains errors, it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine's database.
Use W3C or another site to validate your HTML, checking it for errors. , One of the most common misconceptions to search engine optimization is that if you swap links your site will gain in popularity.
Relevant traffic is what is important here and linking to any old Tom, Dick or Harry will flat out hurt rankings before anything else.
Search Engine Algorithms are focused on relevance.
What you want to do is cross-link with a site that offers similar content or related material, which will benefit you and the person you are linking with.
If your website is about collecting, hobbies, and sports, you do not want to link with someone who collects recipes, or focuses on politics., Paid inclusion and Cost Per Click are options that are also available.
There is a good article about paid inclusion as a means of countering the rising cost of CPC prices, which can be read here:
Target Marketing Mag, Optimizing a website is not enough to maintain the top spots in search engines for your most important keywords.
Algorithms are always changing, and so is the industry.
This step is optional but it is highly encouraged you continuously optimize your site., The best way to judge the success of your optimizing efforts is to continuously monitor and analyze your traffic.
It will continuously offer clues as to which pages are performing the best, keep you aware of consumer interests, and most of all to see what is and what is not working. -
Step 2: Determine your competition's website.
-
Step 3: Include meta and title tags.
-
Step 4: Research keywords.
-
Step 5: Place keywords strategically throughout your content.
-
Step 6: Use alt tags to describe your images.
-
Step 7: Develop some base traffic reports.
-
Step 8: Revise the web content to better suit your keywords.
-
Step 9: Keep providing new content.
-
Step 10: Get other websites to link to you.
-
Step 11: Create a site map.
-
Step 12: Avoid using frames whenever possible.
-
Step 13: Validate your HTML code.
-
Step 14: Build link popularity with your website.
-
Step 15: Include paid content and CPC if necessary.
-
Step 16: Re-optimize continually.
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Step 17: Monitor and report continuously.
Detailed Guide
The first and one of the most important steps to SEO is to analyze your website to determine what changes, if necessary, should be made.
This process includes assessing the site navigation, context, and overall cosmetics of the website.
It is a good practice to develop a task sheet to better proceed with the optimization of the website.
Focus on the individual goals and objectives that are trying to be accomplished and use these as a means of providing the most sufficient results.
Meaning – if you have a site that specializes in sales of sports memorabilia, your content should be relevant and revolve around information pertinent to sports memorabilia, not some off topic content such as baseball records.
Search engines look at domain names, title tags, and header tags to assist them in ranking the website according to relevance.
It is important to maintain consistency in text with the subject of your site. , By knowing your competition in the industry, you will gain a better understanding of what exactly needs to be accomplished.
It is helpful to find the top 5-10 competitors in your industry and find out what methods they are employing (they are at the top of the search engines aren’t they?).
This process also helps with generating valuable keywords for your website.
If you have a site promoting “cheap football tickets” it might be a good idea to go after “discount football tickets” versus “cheap football tickets”.
Not only will the keywords be more geared towards your site's intentions, but they will also bring in more relevant traffic to the site if ranked high enough in the search engines.
Relevant traffic = Return on Investment (ROI)., HTML's meta tag does not alter the content visible on the website; they exist only for search engines and other bots.
Place a title tag at the top of each page to identify the document's overall content.
Write an accurate meta description tag, since it is often used by search engines to describe a site in search results.
Add a meta keyword tag as well to reveal the most important keywords for each page to search engine bots.
Note that Google's search bots do not look at meta keywords, but other search engines may.
Meta tags, however, are not the end all solution to search engine optimization.
They are critical in helping the spiders index the pages – that is, for the search engines that still support them, but will still not skyrocket your rankings to the top of the search engines.
Make sure your keywords are relevant to what is on the page.
If there is no mention of “Golf Clubs” on that page, it makes no sense to include those words in your website.
Keep the description tag brief and to the point.
Avoid non-indexable words such as where, too, and etc.
Incorporating some keywords in the description is often helpful as long as it makes sense.
The more descriptive the tag is towards the content, the better your site will fare in the rankings. , Identify keywords related to your site's content.
These can be popular search terms that lead people to your site, words related to your overall topic, and the topic of a specific page or blog post.
If you're not sure which keywords are popular search terms, there are services online that can help you evaluate keywords, many of them with free trials.
Try KeywordSpy or WordTracker.
Create a spreadsheet and start listing as many words as possible relating to your website.
Focus on every little product, every subject that encompasses the concept of the website.
It is not uncommon for your list to reach close to or over 1000 keywords here.
Once you are finished, sort the list by alphabetizing and removing the duplicate words.
Then single out the words that are the most descriptive of your site.
You will now need to find and use a word tracker program to help analyze the keywords and determine how many times those words are searched for in a day (there are many tools freely available via Google).
This process will help you find the most popular keywords that are relevant to the content of your site. , Having keyword-rich content is the key to performing well with search engines.
Some search engine bots may penalize you for keyword spamming, however, so learn where to focus your efforts:
Use the keywords liberally on your home page.
Include keywords in header tags, title tags, and meta tags.
Include keywords in the anchor text used to describe links.
Use keywords in the URL of new pages. , This makes them searchable by search engine bots, which cannot otherwise detect what is in your images.
If you can, include a keyword or two in these descriptions, but keep the description accurate. , These reports are used to determine the current traffic to your website to see what kind of activity is taking place, where your traffic is coming from, and what pages are the most popular on your website as well as how they currently rank.
If you are not already monitoring your web traffic you will want to do this for at least a month to get a feel for your current volume.
Statcounter is good for monitoring.This step is crucial in the SEO process because these reports will also be used to gauge previous activity to your optimized performance., It should include several variations of web pages, and may also require the modification of some of the content and code.
You will want to create a site map, and incorporate a search engine as well as adding a forum or a blog, a resources page, etc.
All of this plays an important role in Search Engine Optimization and assists in satisfying the likes of the popular search engines., Good Web content is a critical factor in keeping site visitors interested and coming back for more.
This in turn will lead to higher search engine rankings.
When writing new content, keep in mind that each page should have at least 250 words. , Building good incoming or back links can also increase your search engine ranking and website traffic.
List your website in relevant directories and forums, and ask websites on similar topics to link to content on your website.
Most major search engines rank web pages based partially on the number and the quality of links that point to the site. , Site maps are XML files that list every URL in your website.
Your web host may provide this file, or you may have to make it yourself.
Find an example site map file and replace the example URLs with URLs of pages on your website.
Once every page is listed, upload it to the root folder of your web server.
Submit the link to this site map to Google and other major search engines.
Search online for "submit a sitemap" to find sites where you can submit your link.
You may also hire a service to make a sitemap for you. , Frames, which are being used less and less, enable you to split a page into pieces and section off static content to decrease download times.
However, using frames can prevent search engine bots from accessing your entire website.
Providing a site map may mitigate this problem. , While search engines don't care whether your HTML code is error-free, they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out which portions of your web page to index.
If your HTML code contains errors, it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine's database.
Use W3C or another site to validate your HTML, checking it for errors. , One of the most common misconceptions to search engine optimization is that if you swap links your site will gain in popularity.
Relevant traffic is what is important here and linking to any old Tom, Dick or Harry will flat out hurt rankings before anything else.
Search Engine Algorithms are focused on relevance.
What you want to do is cross-link with a site that offers similar content or related material, which will benefit you and the person you are linking with.
If your website is about collecting, hobbies, and sports, you do not want to link with someone who collects recipes, or focuses on politics., Paid inclusion and Cost Per Click are options that are also available.
There is a good article about paid inclusion as a means of countering the rising cost of CPC prices, which can be read here:
Target Marketing Mag, Optimizing a website is not enough to maintain the top spots in search engines for your most important keywords.
Algorithms are always changing, and so is the industry.
This step is optional but it is highly encouraged you continuously optimize your site., The best way to judge the success of your optimizing efforts is to continuously monitor and analyze your traffic.
It will continuously offer clues as to which pages are performing the best, keep you aware of consumer interests, and most of all to see what is and what is not working.
About the Author
Lori Garcia
Brings years of experience writing about crafts and related subjects.
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