ComCorp

Optimization Tips and Tricks

Posted on 22. Jun, 2008 by ComCorp in Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization has become the prime force in the whole industry of internet marketing. While their are other factors in growing your business, it certainly helps to have an understanding of some of the tips and tricks to make your web site more visible to search engines. These tips fall into four main areas: Structure, content, keywords and Meta tags, and links

WEBSITE STRUCTURE

This refers to the way your web site is arranged and is the basis of everything else related to SEO. In order to make your web site clean and lean eliminate things such as re-directs, frames, image maps, flash and programming and scripting languages such as CGI and PHP. The underlying problem factor in each of these no-no’s is that search engine indexes just don’t work on the navigation menus.

Re-directs are essentially blank pages that direct you to another page. Eliminate these useless pages since if they happen to be the landing page, your entire web site may not be indexed.

In the case of frames and the sophisticated programming languages, you can use HTML to accomplish the same thing, without choking the search engines. If you want to use image maps, include the links elsewhere on the same page with the image map as a text link.

Flash has become popular with many but they cause the search engines to slow down, and sometimes give up altogether. If the search engine can’t get past a tacky header to reach your content, neither will the readers.

WEBSITE CONTENT

This is probably the most important tip about SEO. It is the content that the search engine spiders must find. The content should consist of an ample amount of to the point, informative content which uses the keywords in a way that makes sense. Simply adding more text to your website which makes no sense or is irrelevant to the subject of your web site can result in you being permanently blacklisted from the search engine results.

A good way to insure that you have good content is to include informative articles and change them often. This means that you appear as an expert in your field of knowledge, you please the search engines, and visitors enjoy coming to your site to learn about the latest information on your subject.

KEYWORDS & TAGS

Develop and use relevant keywords about your website and its content.

Your keywords should be scattered throughout your web pages, with at least three per page. Don’t make the mistake of simply repeating a keyword over and over, hiding a keyword by making it the same color as the web page background, or running all the keywords together as gibberish. The keywords should be smoothly woven into interesting and informational sentences.

Follow the same guidelines for the descriptive sentences used in the ALT tags for site images and for the META tags.

LINKS

A larger number of quality links to your site from other qualified sites indicates to Google that other web site owners have an awareness of your site and respect the information there. An increased number of outbound links will show that you are sharing content about a like field. Two cautions apply with outbound links though: you don’t want to be a traffic hog; neither do you want to link too extensively to your competitors’ websites.