How to optimize your website for search engines

26Mar08

Internet has become an important marketing channel for all kinds of businesses. Enterprises spend a lot of money and resources so that their websites rank higher in the search results. A lot has been already written about the search engine optimization. Search engine optimization helps to rank one’s website higher than competitor’s website, when a customer puts a search query related to your product or service on any of the search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process by which one makes one-self (or one’s products or services) visible to the customers. This is a marketing initiative and should be considered as a part of total marketing strategy.

Search engines use complex algorithms to index the web-pages. In common parlance, search engines crawl on the internet and index the web-pages based on the keywords they find on one’s page. When a customer goes to any search engine and types a keyword then search engines show pages that they find most relevant.

Our goal is simple. We want to rank our website higher than our competitors ‘. But at the same time, we want to make our website useful and customer-friendly. For now, we are focusing on the first goal here.

We can be successful in our goal by focusing on the following points:

1. Choose the search engines that you want to focus on

2. Select right keywords

3. Create web-pages that search engines can read

4. Put keywords on your web-pages at the right places

5. Register with the search engines

6. Few other tidbits

a. Use web analytics tools to track everything on the website

b. Linking from other resources

First let us talk about the search engines. Fortunately, there are very few search engines available. Most important search engines are: Google, Yahoo Directory, MSN Live Search, AskJeeves, Inktomi, AllTheWeb . Google is the most popular search engine and holds more than 50% of share in search marketing. Yahoo and MSN ranks second and third in the market share. We do not need to follow different strategies for each of the search engine and this makes our job a bit easy.

Most important point in the SEO is choosing right keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases that are used by customers to search service or product. There are few strategies that could be used to find the right keywords.

• Find out your 5 nearest competitors (or at most 10). Go to compete.com and find out the top keywords that are used to search the customers’ website [Alternatively you can also use Alexa or wordtracker ]
• You will get a fair idea of the keywords that customers use to search competition. Once you know these keywords then you can start playing with the keywords. You can use Google Keyword Tool to find combination of words or phrases that are used with the keyword.
• Talk to the customers and talk with your team to choose the combination of right keywords (make phrases or combine words intelligently)
• Some times customers mis-spell these keywords while searching. Make a list of such keywords
• Rank all the keywords in terms of importance

Now, we have to put those keywords on the web-page. But, before that make sure that our web-pages can be read by the search engines. A lot of cool and jazzy technologies are still not readable by internet search engines. We should avoid them on our websites. Few important things that we should remember are:

• Do not use dynamically generated pages. Most of the search engines are not comfortable while crawling dynamically generated pages.
• Search engines like to read static html pages so our main pages should be made in static html
• Do not use Javascript for navigation purposes on the website [Put javascript outside base html document]
• Avoid flash, plug-ins, session ids and images as search engines can not read these information
• Avoid putting text into images
• Avoid dangling pages
• Do not use frames and tables. Search engines do not like them
• Use plain text as that is most effective with the search engines

Once we have made sure that our web-pages could be read by the search engines, we come to the next question. Where we should put the keywords (or keyword phrases) on the web-pages? Make your keywords noticeable to the search engines. Most important rules are :

• Most important keywords (combinations of keywords or keyword phrases) should be put in the title tag of each page. A title could be 50-75 characters long with the spaces and comma.
• Important keywords (combinations of keywords or keyword phrases) should be put in the description tag of each page. A description could be 150-200 characters long with the spaces and comma.
• Optimize your body content. Arrange page’s body content such that important keywords contains several of them close together with a call to action and other benefits.
• Use meta keyword tags to put less important keywords. You can also put mis-spelled keywords in these meta tags. Do not use more than 15 words in meta tags
• Use keyword tags to navigate or provide links to other pages
• Each web-page should have relevant keywords in title, description and meta tags

Once you have completed all these activities then you should also register on the search engines. Use Google Addurl to register your website on the Google. Similarly, you can also register with other search engines.

There are few other things that will help you in the longer run to make your web-site more effective.

1. Track everything on your website. You need to track things such as search engine queries that are bringing traffic to your website, number of unique views, bounce rate, time on site, number of pages viewed etc. Put web-analytics tool on your website. Google analytics provide free tools that could be used.

2. Links from other websites also bring a lot of traffic and help you gain higher rank with the search engines. You need to find out that who is providing links to your website. You can use Yahoo and Google to get an idea of the number of links to your site. You can also use these tools to find the links to your competitors’ website. You should always find out that which links are providing you most traffic (use analytics tool). Always remember that links from authoritative and relevant sites provide you more leverage with the search engines. These links also bring right traffic (traffic that you want) to your website. You should always try to get links on such sites. Bloggers are also becoming important source to provide links to your websites. Find out which bloggers write about you and your competition. These bloggers can be best evangelists for your services or products. It will be a nice idea to provide beta versions of your products (or details of service) to these bloggers so they can independently write about your products or services.

All these points should help you in the process of search engine optimization. If you find out that you are not getting expected results then check and modify few things that you have been doing.

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Tags: Internet, Keyword, Search Engine Optimization, SEO