Organic Search results appear in the non-advertising areas of the search engine results page. This is the equivalent of FREE advertising, so search engine optimization (SEO) is a very important strategy for creating a successful web site. So, it is imperative that you create an effective SEO strategy to help your web site bring you new customers. Here are 10 ways to improve your search engine optimization strategy.
1. Keywords: Develop unique keywords and relevant titles for each of your web site pages and each article or blog you publish.
2. Content: The depth of research and development applied to your content strategy will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of traffic you receive in organic search. “Content” includes the written word, applications, widgets, tools and other digital assets.
3. Copy writing: Adding one word or phrase in the right place can increase visibility for a particular keyword. Be careful in your approach, and consider the human element, no matter how tempting it is to over-tweak.
4. Permanent Links: Start the process of cataloging multiple redirects and campaign URL’s and set up permanent redirects to make it easier for the engines to find the “real” URL.
5. Interlinking: Link to others web sites, have others link to yours. Writing useful articles that link back to your web site and getting others to use the articles on their home pages is one of the best strategies for improving your rankings in the search engines.
6. Feed submission: Determine which feeds are most relevant to your business (products, maps, etc.) and take steps to provide data to the engines. With placements like Google Maps, a feed could be a quick ticket to a No. 1, No. 2, or No. 3 natural ranking.
7. Title and Description: Create a succinct title and description, which along with your Keywords, is an important part of your meta strategy for SEO.
8. Linking Architecture: Search engines need a unique URL for each page to actually index each page separately. Using parameters like /ShowArticle.cfm?article_id=14 doesn’t work. You could have a million articles linked like this, but the search engines wouldn’t know it. But search engines do like /ShowArticle.cfm/14 - if your information architect designs your system in this way, you can be assured that every article or web page will be reviewed by the search engines - making sure each has a different title, keyword list and description will guarantee that the search engines actually index the articles and pages. This is the best strategy for getting search engines to crawl your site and index content.
9. Clean up broken links: Find and remove permanently broken internal links or set up properly configured 404 error page to improve crawling performance that lets engines know that the old link is history.
10. Make your pages smaller by removing common JavaScript and CSS code to external files. The files are then cached by the browser and your page loads quicker and the search engines can crawl your pages quicker and easier.
These are only a few of the many things you can do to help your SEO. They are free and if you can coordinate all of these things into your web site, they are also very effective.
Bonus Information!
For coders, these are some of the areas that must be taken into consideration:
*Meta Tags - though your title, keywords and description in your site’s meta-tags may have been effective when you launched your site, this can change. Your meta-tags must be tested regularly - it is important to test and re-test your meta data.
*Content - like meta tags, your site content must be updated regularly and must reflect the meta data you are using. When it comes to search engine indexing, the continuity of your meta data and content are checked. Event the order in which your keywords are set and HTML like bold text can make your information easier for the search engine spiders to crawl.
*Links - building links on your site allows you to become more friendly on-line. By making friends virtually, you are increasing your popularity and reputation on-line. This interlinking is an effective strategy to promote your site - the more relevant your links are, the more powerful your web site becomes.
For marketers, this is the most powerful way to build traffic.
*In-Bound Links - Article marketing is one of the key ways to build in-bound links. Every site that posts one of your articles becomes a billboard pointing back to your web site. Imagine having an article on 1,000 web sites - that’s 1,000 billboards pointing to your web site. Now imaging 100 articles on 1,000 web site pointing back to your web site - that is 100,000 billboards that make your site one of the highest ranked sites on the Internet.
When you implement these Strategies, you’ll find two long-term benefits for your website:
1) This will boost your web site search engine rankings. 2) This will attract quality traffic to your site.
Teo Graca works with Social Media, Social Networking, Podcasting, Blogging and other technologies, has an extensive background in video and music production, and has spent the last dozen years designing and implementing information systems.
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