Search Engine Optimization

Introduction and Overview

Everyday, millions of people use search engines to find information on products and services. However, most people generally only visit the first few result pages generated by search engines, which causes poorly ranked sites to be missed. Without top positions, your site could be overlooked and therefore, undiscovered. For this reason, you want to make sure your site has every opportunity to appear as high as possible.

As the Internet continues to increase in the number of users and websites, our companies face more competition everyday. What does this mean for us and our business? This means that in order to keep our websites competitive and our ranking as high as possible, we must perform what is know as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Optimizing your site can dramatically improve your page ranking in the major search engines. There are many things we can do to perform optimization but one thing we must all understand is that SEO is not a one-time deal; we must consistently perform these optimization tactics in order to continue and see positive results with our search engine ranking.

Though every search engine has its own unique process, most search engines work by using term-frequency and keywords as the primary ways of ranking websites. The information below provides tips on how you can improve your search engine placement. As these ideas are not guaranteed to rank you No.1 in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL, they will definitely help to increase your exposure and offer better opportunity for your website to be located by a user searching for topics relating to your business.

Analyze Your Competition - Where do they rank?

The first step is to analyze your competition in the major search engines to see where thier website ranks compared to yours. If they are higher than your website when searching certain keywords then you must ask yourself, why are they ranked higher? Is it because they have more content, better written content or maybe because they have more links pointing to their website? Whatever it may be, it will help your business to analyze your competition. So see where they stand, analyze their ranking and apply the following Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics to your website.

META Tags - Keywords, Descriptions and Titles

META Tags are an element of HTML coding on a website that is used by search engines to index a website. Most META tags are included within the 'header' code of a website and the most important tags are the title, description and keyword tags. Rules used by different search engines govern how such tags are used, how many characters they should contain, and how they should be formatted. Below our some general ideas on how to setup the META tags of your website.

A META tag title is the heading of your page that you will see on the top left portion of the internet browser. This is a caption that will be used by the search engines and displayed for viewers of your website. A title should be relative to your business and should include some main keywords relating to your business. It is important to keep the title under 80 characters in length.

META tag keywords should list important words that you suspect your target audience will type in when looking for your type of business on the internet. The list of keywords will be used by the search engine crawlers to index your pages. A common mistake people make is to list too many keywords or to list the same words over and over again. If either of these mistakes is made, many search engine crawlers will consider this spamming and will decrease your page ranking. Be sure to keep the number of words to 20 or under and make sure to not list the same keywords more than once.

A META tag description is a short explanation of your business. The search engine crawlers will take the description and will list it with your listing in the search engines. It is important to carefully write 200 character max sentences and phrases, targeting the most important words contained on your web pages. When you are writing the META tag descriptions, try to eliminate as many filler words as you can to make room for your keywords.

Content Development - Search engines love content!

Every search engine crawler will analyze your websites content and determine how relevant it is in relation to a users search. Content Development is very important to your website and its search engine ranking and should be carefully performed for every page of your site. Content should be carefully written to include frequent keywords and grouped words that could be possible search terms by your target audience.

Content is a touchy subject to some business owners because some feel websites should not be too wordy and others feel that without enough content you will not provide enough information and could lose a potential sale. Whatever your choice, you need to find a medium when writing content for your website. There needs to be enough content to provide information to your users and to the search engine crawlers without being too wordy and boring.

Search Engine Submission - Perform Manual Submission Too

As most search engine robots will crawl your website and index it automatically, it's also important to perform manual search engine submission of your site on your own. You can go to certain search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN to perform the manual submission of your own website. All you'll need is the URL of your website to make the submission.