If you want people to find your pages on the Web, then it is absolutely vital that you optimize your pages for search engines. In 2008, Google revealed it was indexing approximately one trillion unique URLs. With this amount of competition for viewers, the chance that people will choose to view your page over others is slim to none unless you put work into optimizing your site.
Use the right keywords. By researching the right keywords to use, you will make sure that search engines rank you for the subject you want to be ranked for. Do keyword research first to make sure you are using keywords that people actually search for; don’t go by your own guesses.
If your site hasn’t taken advantage of the social networking trend, you could be missing out on significant opportunities. Creating an online presence on the major social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can create exponential increases in the quality and quantity of sites and users that link back to your original site. In turn, this makes your site more relevant in search engine results.
Holding a contest, giveaway, or sweepstakes is a great way to attract visitors to your website, but make sure you find out about the applicable laws in your area. Checking out a competitor’s website to see how they run their contest is a great place to start your research, but don’t just copy their rules verbatim!
Allow readers to subscribe to your categories through RSS so they can be alerted when a new articles is posted in a topic they’re interested in. This is a great way to ensure that your audience returns whenever you add new content and that it gets read and shared with others.
Optimize your site for local searches by including descriptions of your physical location. You might include brief descriptions like nearby towns, metropolitan areas, and directional keywords like north, south, east, and west. You could also mention some local attractions. All of this will help to make your site show up in many more searches.
Don’t ever design a website without thinking about search engine optimization. Make sure the web designer understands that you want organic search engine optimization. Doing a retrofit to your new Flash based site after it’s built won’t do the job. Spiders can only crawl with text, not flash or images.
When looking for ways to optimize your site, start with the HTML code itself, specifically, the title tag. Your site’s title tag, which appears first in the ‘Head’ section of the code, should be very brief, approximately, 7 to 12 words. The primary keyword of your page should be present and absolutely no keywords within the title tag should be duplicated. This presents a quick and concise title for search engines.
Know who you are selling to. Find out everything you can about your target market. One of the first things you should know is how many people make up your target market. You can get a good idea of this by searching your product on Google’s Free Keyword Tool. It will give you some likely keywords along with the number of people who have searched using those keywords.
As you can see, techniques for search engine optimization are vital to having a successful web presence. With these tips, you’re now armed to take a look at your website with a fresh eye, and make improvements and changes as necessary. You’ll get more results, more visibility, and make your website pay off.