Top SEO Strategies
By Matt Hodkinson
There are many Search Engine Optimization tricks available to any Mom embarking on an e-business venture. Some of these techniques can be planned before you start, whilst others form the basis for a successful, long-term strategy.
If you’re in the early stages of e-business, and have yet to register your domain name, it would be prudent to consider your target market and associated keywords before you start. Many search engines will favour websites which feature search terms of elements of search terms in the domain name. It’s worth remembering though, that keeping the name short and memorable is just as important. Your venture may do well in search engines with a name like www.bluetoothcellphonesandaccessories.com but it doesn'’t exactly roll off the tongue now, does it!?
The next step is to look at the HTML code of your web pages, and incorporate key search terms and keywords in there. Your keywords should comprise those terms for which you will be searched by your potential customers, and placing them into the HTML code, in the right places, can boost your ranking in those search results.
File Names
Naming your html files with keywords relevant to that page will earn favour with many search engines, as it confirms their assessment of the page’s content. A page named phoneaccessories.html will fair better than PA1136.html for obvious reasons. Remember, these HTML tags are concerned with re-assuring the engines that your content is relevant to the search terms, and are of good quality.
Title Tag
The <Title> tag provides another space for your keywords to reside, and the contents of this tag will often be displayed in the list of search results. You should therefore use this space to sell your site to the “surfer” and persuade them to click on your link in preference to a competitor.
Header Tags
The use of the header tags can place more prominence on your keywords in the actual body of the page content. By using the standard H1 and H2 tags for headers, you are telling search engines that these words mean more about your content and overall subject than your standard paragraph text. By the same token, the use of bolding and large fonts on your keywords will have the same effect, especially when these keywords are placed in the first and last few lines of body text.
Meta Tags
Many search engines ignore Meta data, but some of the more prominent names are known to take an interest, and for the minimal effort involved in including Meta tags, it is worth capturing those surfers who are more discerning with their choice of search engine. Include keywords and site description information in your Meta tags, but be sure to keep the amount of data to a minimum, focussing only on the main search terms you expect to score with. Too much Meta data will get you flagged as desperate!
As well as HTML information, the overall keyword saturation of your site content is extremely important. This is calculated as keywords being a percentage of the number of words on a page. Therefore if a 100-word article contains 5 instances of a keyword or search term, then your keyword saturation is 5%. In fact, a saturation of around 5% is considered to be good, again not seeming too desperate, but leaving the search engines in no doubt of the subject matter.
Linking
Linking should form a large part of your ongoing search engine optimization strategy. More information on Linking can be found in the article; Drive traffic to your site with links.
Navigation around your site is an important factor of making it usable to your visitors. In addition, a good navigation policy can assist the search engine crawlers (used for indexing your site and individual pages) to find all the information, and store it in their register. The use of a site map, as well as the inclusion of frequent internal links around your site pages, will help you to rank quicker with all the major search engines.
Lastly, and as an ongoing concern, you should be looking at what your competitors are doing. There are many tools on the market for finding the keyword saturation, linking popularity and page indexing saturation of competitor sites. For instance, you can find out how many links a site has by typing "“link: http://www.competitorname.com"” into the major search engines. Once you know this information, you can see who they are linking to, and target the same associates as part of your strategy. Supplementing this with the other techniques outlined in this article could just give you the edge!
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