Optimizing Your Website — The Basics

Optimizing For The Search Engines

Search engine optimization is crucial to your traffic flow. No matter what you are selling, saying or doing on your website you need people to be aware of your site for it to thrive. The best website in the world is wasted if no one knows that it is there.

If you are not listed in any of the search engines no one will be able to find you unless they type your URL into their web browser. Once you understand how to optimize your website for the search engines, your site will be easier to find and the number of visitors to your website will increase over time.

Positioning Your Website

Having your website listed on the first page of a search engine’s results will give you the most exposure. The closer you are to the top of the page, or the higher the position you have in the search results, the greater the number of visitors you will receive.

By optimizing your website you can exercise some control over your position and where your site shows up in the search results of the search engines. You should try to optimize your website to rank somewhere in the top ten results, or at least the first 3 results pages (studies have shown that viewers will rarely pass the third page of search results.)

Optimization of Web Page Keywords & Content

First focus on your keywords and keyword density but don’t sacrifice your message. Write your content like you were writing to a friend. Let your creativity take over and write from your heart. Focus on what you want to say and don’t worry about optimizing your web page content until you are completely satisfied with your message.

Once you have your content it is essential to utilize the meta tags keywords, description, and title. Use your keywords when naming your pages and also for paragraph headings. Not all search engines operate exactly the same. But, if you follow the optimization tips outlined below you will do just fine on most of them.

Best Areas To Place Keywords

1. In the filename – Include keywords in the filename of each page that best describes the content of the web page.
2. The page title – It is important to have a page title (i.e. header) that includes your keywords. Be sure to emphasize the content of your web page.
3. First paragraph of your web page – Include your keywords in the first paragraph of each web page. Some say that you should include your keywords into the last paragraph as well.

Optimization Tips

• Place keywords in the title tag.
• Place keywords in your content.
• Make sure your keywords accurately describe the theme or subject of your page.
• Create a list of words that your potential viewers will use in the search engines to find your site
• Make sure you have content near JavaScript, if you use JavaScript on your website (CSS and JavaScript are nice, however, search engine robots don’t know what to do with it and often give up if there’s no content nearby.)
• If your website is a business, make sure you put your business address and other relevant contact information onto your website (Directories look for this when reviewing business sites.)
• Be sure that your page titles reflect your keywords and be sure to repeat them in the body text of the page.
• There should be plenty of text links on your website, rather than links that robots can’t follow such as image map links and links in dropdown menus.
• Read each search engine’s FAQ page before submit your URL, you want to avoid spamming these search engines (each has a different policy, and their policies change often.)
• Try to get links from other websites to yours.If other websites similar to yours link to you it will increase the relevancy of your site to the search engines.

Links From Other Websites

One of the biggest things that search engines look for, after content and theme, are quality links to your website from reputable internet addresses. Just any links won’t do. They must be roughly the same subject matter and rank well on the search engines. This can be one of the most difficult parts of the optimization process but if your site is interesting, full of rich content and you keep growing your website they will come.

Website Promotion

Remember that while search engines are a primary way people look for web sites, they are not the only way. People also find sites through word-of-mouth, traditional advertising, traditional media, news group postings, web directories, and links from other sites. Many times, these alternative forms are much more effective than search engines.

ROR/RSS Sitemap Generator

For starters be sure to add a ROR/RSS sitemap to your root directory to help the search engines classify your site. This type of sitemap is easy for the search engines to use when classifying your website.

HTML Sitemap

Another important page on your website is a text only HTML sitemap. Although an ROR/RSS sitemap is important for classifying your website with the search engines, the content of your site is better expressed by an HTML sitemap. This is where the human visitors will look to find your content.