Archive for July, 2010

Having a website that gets displayed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, etc. isn’t tough to do, but it may be difficult to know where to start. Here are the newest and greatest tips to get you started:

1.    Do not buy a new domain if not you have to. The search engines put so much stock in how long your website and domain have been around. While you may buy a new domain and redirect your old one to the new one, your best bet is to use your existing domain/website if at all probable. If you’re redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some or other reason, you may expect at least somewhat of a loss in search engine traffic. It might be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months or more.

2.    Optimize your site for your target visitors, not for the search engines. This might sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. The search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their small search box. If those “someones” are typing in search words that relate to what your site gives, then they are most probable members of your target audience. You have to optimize your site to meet their requirements. If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you require finding out one way or another. Look for studies online that may give demographic information, and see other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be vital to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

3.    Research your keyword phrases broadly. The phrases you think your target market may be searching for may very well be false. To find the best phrases to optimize for, use research tools like Keyword Discovery, Word tracker or Google’s Keyword Tool. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and opt a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords like “travel” or “vacation,” as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is actually about.

4.    Design and categorize your site architecture and navigation relied on your keyword research. Your research might uncover undiscovered areas of interest or ways of categorizing your products/services that you may wish to add to your site. For example, let’s say your site sells toys. There are many ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that populace will find the toys they’re looking for. Are people looking for toys to fit their child’s stage of progress? Or are they more probable to be seeking precise brands of toys? Most probable, your keyword research will show you that people are looking for toys in a lot of dissimilar ways. Your job is to make certain that your site’s navigation showcases a variety of ways of searching. Make certain you have links to specific-brand pages as well as exact age ranges, precise types of toys, etc.

5.    Program the site of yours to be “crawler-friendly.” The search engines can’t fill out forms, can’t search your site, can’t read JavaScript links and menus, and can’t construe graphics and Flash. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use these things on your site; you most surely can! However, you do require giving alternate means of navigating your site as necessary. If you have only a drop-down sequence of menus to opt a category or a brand of something, the search engine crawlers will never find those resulting pages. You’ll require making sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on each and every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. From those pages, you’ll require to have further HTML links to the individual product/service pages.

6.    Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (aka alt tags) as obviously and descriptively as probable. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable part of your links (aka the anchor text) to help them understand what they’re going to find once they click. Don’t make them presume what’s at the other end with links that say “click here” or other non-descriptive words. Be as descriptive as likely with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you may almost always portray the page you’re pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.

7.    Write convincing copy for the key pages of your site based on your opted keyword phrases and your target market’s requirements, and make certain it’s copy that the search engines can see. This is a vital component to having a successful website. The search engines require reading keyword-rich copy on your pages so they may understand how to classify your site. This copy mustn’t be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most pertinent keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. Comprehend that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The vital thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Just sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no obvious reason isn’t going to cut it, and it just looks silly.

8.    Integrate your keyword phrases into each page’s distinctive Title tag. Title tags are critical as they’re given a lot of weight with every search engine. Whatever keyword phrases you’ve written your copy around ought to also be used in your Title tag. Bear in mind that the information that you place in this tag is what will show up as the clickable link to your site at the search engines. Make certain that it accurately reflects the content of the page it’s on, while also using the keyword phrases people may be using at a search engine to find your stuff.

9.    Make certain your site is “link-worthy.” Other sites linking to yours is a critical part of a successful search engine optimization campaign, as all of the main search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site’s overall link popularity. You may go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site stinks, why would anybody want to link to it? On the other hand, if your site is full of superb, useful information, other sites will of course link to it without your even asking. It’s well to trade links; just make certain you are providing your site visitors with only the highest quality of associated sites. When you link to lousy sites, remember what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

10.    Don’t be married to any one keyword phrase or anxious so much about rankings. If you’ve done the above 9 things correctly, you will start to see an increase in targeted search engine visitors to your site fairly quickly. Forget about where you rank for any exact keyword phrase and instead measure your results in increased traffic, sales, and conversions. (You may sign in for a Google Analytics for free, which easily tracks and measures those things that truly matter.) It surely won’t hurt to add new content to your site if it will really make your site more useful, but don’t just add a load of fluff just for the sake of adding something. It actually is okay to have a business site that is just a business site and not a diatribe on the history of your goods. Neither your site visitors nor the engines actually give a hoot!