Search Engine Optimization Common Sense 101

[administrator]

Optimizing your Web site for search is largely a matter of applying simple, common sense practices to every page of your Web site and to your link building strategy.
The very first step in Web site SEO is identifying your relevent keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases that most closely describe each page of your site. For example let's pretend that you have a Web site offering large-breed dogs for sale. You have a homepage, a page featuring Doberman Pinchers, a page featuring Great Danes and a page featuring Saint Bernards. Dogs for Sale then would be a good example of a keyword phrase for your homepage. However, Dogs for Sale is very generic. A better keyword phrase for your site might be Large-Breed Dogs for Sale or Large Dogs for Sale. Great Danes for Sale, Doberman Pinchers for Sale and Saint Bernards for Sale would be examples of keywords for each of your other pages respectively. It's possible to research the popularity of keywords and phrases before settling on your specific terms. Google has a very nice tool to do this included in their adwords program.
Once your keywords have been identified, you'll need to include them in the title and meta tags of the pages on your Web site. Each page of your Web site should have a 6-10 word title that is keyword rich and written in a way that is meaningful for people as well as search engines. The text that you use in your title will display as the link text for your site when it's returned in a search engine's listings. For the most part, today's search engines ignore meta tags. However, the description meta tag is still important and is widely used by engines. All pages on your site should have a unique description. The description should be between one and two sentences in length and should use your keywords to describe the content of your page. The description that you provide will generally appear under the link for you site in a search engine's results. Engines will, however, override your description and use different text on your page if they believe that different text is more relative to a specific search than your description.
Once every page of your Web site is optimized so that engines and people can clearly understand your content and theme, you're ready to start working on building back links. Back links are links to various pages of your site from other people's Web sites. There are many programs and services out there that will help generate links, but the best way to get links is to give users something useful to which they will want to link. Blogs, forums and free services are just a few things that you can add to your site to help generate links. When asking users to link to your site, provide them with the anchor text that you would like them to use. Your anchor text should be very similar to your page title except it shouldn't contain as many words. Ideally, anchor text should be 3-5 words in length and should utilize the keywords for your page.
If you create a site using old-fashioned common sense that has good, useful content that's easy for a person to use and understand, then your site should also be easy for search engines to understand, and you'll be well on your way to having a site that's optimized for search.