Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly
One of the most important things for your online business is for your website to get listed in the search engines. Before you even do that, your website must be properly coded so that the search engines can pick up on your website information.
First, let me begin by explaining some of the terms you will probably see related to search engines. The first term is SERP. This stands for Search Engine Result Positions. Basically, this is how high on the search engines your website is listed. You want to be listed high because most people won’t look through a lot of pages to find you. They usually find what they need on the first or second page. The second term you need to know is SEO. This stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO includes all of the things you can do to your website to give you a better SERP. Another term you need to know is spider. A spider is a “bot” that the search engine sends out to your website. The spider then reads your website and sends the information back to the search engine’s index. There is actually a bit more to it than this, but it is all you need to know for this particular article.
Domain
First and foremost, you should have your own domain. Purchasing a domain is not very expensive. It is usually less than $10/year. I recommend GoDaddy because of their easy to use interface. Plus, you can usually get a discount by searching the internet for GoDaddy coupon codes.
When you use a free service and use their subdomain, you don’t end up with the credit you deserve in the rankings. For example, Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the main domain name. So, if you use the same domain as a bunch of other people, you will never be able to see what your true traffic rankings are. Also, you are left with a long, unmemorable link. Visitors are more likely to return if they can remember how to find you.
When purchasing a domain, you should try to find a name that contains your most important keyword(s). Having your keywords in your link helps your search engine rankings. Also, except for your index page, it helps to place a keyword in the name of each of your webpages.
Keywords
Before we go into anything else, you will want to know what keywords you should use with your website. Keywords are the words that people use to search the internet. The more often a word is searched, the better it is to have it as one of your keywords. If you aren’t sure what keywords would work best for you, I recommend using the free tools at Google Adwords and/or Overture. These website show you how often keywords are searched. You may also want to check out SEO Chat for keyword suggestions and several other good, free SEO tools.
There are three main terms used when talking about keywords. The first is Keyword Density. This is the number of times your keyword appears compared to the number of other words on your webpage. You want this to be between 3-6%. The second term is Keyword Frequency. This is the number of times a specific keyword appears on your page. The third term is Keyword Prominence. This is how close your keywords are to the beginning of your page, sentence, title, or metatag.
After reading this article, you may want to check your website’s keyword performance. You can do this for free at http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html.
Header Tags
One of the most important areas of your website is your Header Tags. When you look at the HTML code for your website, the first section should look something like this:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>The Title of Your Website</TITLE>
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Here you would write the description of your website.”>
<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”this is where you would place the keywords for your website”>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
The last two lines before the </HEAD> are called your Meta Tags. If you do not have this section on your website, feel free to copy and paste the section above into it. Now, let’s look more closely at this.
The Title Tag
The <TITLE> is where you place your title. You want this limit this to 5-10 words, but you also want it to be as descriptive as possible. The reason for this is because your <TITLE> tag is the most important thing searched by the engines. It tells the search engine what the content of your webpage is. By the way, this is called “keyword prominence.” Also, these are the words that will appear as the link in the search engines. Your visitors may not click on the link if it doesn’t tell them what they are going to see right away.
Think about it. When you do a search, you end up with hundreds of possible links. You probably scan down the page just reading the blue links. When one catches your eye, then you read the description below it and decide if you want to click on it. Right?
So, you may want to put specific words in your title and not the name of your business. People are more likely to search for “product name” than “your business name.” You want to use good keywords in your title tag. However, don’t fill the tag with just keywords. It should make sense when you read it.
You are going to want a different title tag on every page. You want to do this for two reasons. First, the search engines frown upon this. They don’t like pages with duplicated content and having the same exact title tag on every page will be seen as duplicate. The second reason why you want different title tags on every page is because it helps outline your page’s content for the search engine and the potential visitor. You will begin to notice that some of your website’s pages will rank higher than others depending on the search terms used.
Also, don’t repeat any words more than twice and don’t use all caps. Title tags with both upper and lower case are better for your rankings.
The Meta Tags
There are two main meta tags they both follow the same rules as the title tag: you want them to be different for every page, you don’t want to repeat words more than twice, don’t use caps, use descriptive keywords, don’t use keywords that aren’t related to your website.
The first meta tag is the description tag. This is what is show in the search engine results below the page link. This is what your customer will read to determine if he/she wants to visit your website. This is your opportunity to grab your reader’s interest. Tell him/her why they should visit your website! You should limit this to about 200-255 characters since most search engines won’t show more than that and you want your entire message to be shown. Of course, different search engines will show a different amount of your description, so you may want to think about that when you are writing your description. For example, Google shows about 60 characters, but they do index more than that.
The second meta tag is the keywords tag. There is a bit of debate about whether or not you should use this tag anymore. Some search engines are now ignoring it but others aren’t. The reason why these are becoming less popular is because there is an increasing number of people who spam the indexes with keywords not related to their website. I always put them in my header tags because I don’t want to miss out on the search engines that still use them. If finding out what tags each search engine uses is important to you, you can search their websites’ help files for information about how they use meta tags. That way, you can optimize your website according to which search engines are most important to you. If you are unsure of what to write in your meta tags, I would suggest you check out some other websites. Do a search for your type of business and find your main competitors. Look at their header tags and make a note of what you like/dislike about them. You don’t want to use the same exact tags because it would be considered duplicate content by the search engines.
Other Places to Optimize
There are several other things that you can do to your website that the search engines will pick up on. Things to keep in mind are: spiders read the page from left to right, top to bottom. Therefore, your most important material should be at the top of your page. Also,
spiders are not very smart. They only read your HTML script. They don’t pick up on things like images and java script.
Tags
Header Tags: You will want to include your keywords in header tags. These look like this <h1>, <h2>, <h3>. An example would be: <h1> The heading on the top of your page </h1>. You should only use one H1 tag since it is considered to be the page heading. You can use the others as much as you would like. Search engines will find these tags and consider the words inside of them to be important.
Alt Tags: Since spiders can’t read images, it helps to use alt tags with them. An alt tag <alt> will look like this when used with an image: <img src=”http://YourImageURL.com/image.gif” alt=”image description”> You should use keywords in your alt tags whenever possible.
Other Tags: Spiders will look at your other tags as well, so don’t be afraid to use them. Examples include: bold (or strong), italic, underline
Content
Your website’s information is another factor in your search engine placement. Even though some parts of your webpage are more important than others, search engines do look at your entire page. The more text/content you have on a page, the more the spider will pick up. You want to make sure that your content contains a lot of your primary keywords while, at the same time, making sense to your readers.
Popularity / Links
The popularity of your website will also affect how well you place in the rankings. Getting people to link to your website will help in your search engine placement, but that is another discussion altogether. You can help your own website by placing links to other parts of your own website throughout your website.
Other Tools
There are tons of tools available on the internet that can help you with your SERP. I tend to stick to free tools because there are a lot of good ones out there. I am a bit wary of the ones that I have to pay for because I know that I can usually find something similar for free. Google has some pretty good tools that helps with your SERP. Head over to their
website for a list of their helpful programs.
Conclusion
Nothing is guaranteed to help you reach the top of the search engines, however, the above methods have helped me with my search engine placement. I would beware of any of those services that claim to help you get a higher website ranking, because you really can do it yourself. Plus, you save a lot of money doing it yourself. Keep in mind that the search engines take a while to work. Don’t expect your rankings to jump overnight.
The most important thing to remember is that you should like what you do. The rest will follow!