If you are a novice website owner and just getting your bearings together regarding the need to optimize your site for higher page ranking by Google and other search engines, this brief crash course on basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques may be just what you are looking for. By generally following these tips you set the platform for higher page rank over time.
1. DOMAIN NAME:
Try and name your domain name after your business. In other words, if you plan on selling bricks from your website you could name your site domain name ‘bricksrus.com” or “thebrickbusiness.com” …any name incorporating the word “brick” in the domain name will help search engines index your site and page ranking over time.
2. GOOD KEYWORD CONTENT:
If you are designing your own HTML pages for your site, you probably already know that you need keyword rich text that uses keywords to describe your business, product or service. As mentioned above, if you are in the brick business, you could use words that describe your products like: “bricks, red bricks, cement bricks, cinder bricks, small bricks, large bricks, etc. By using the keyword “brick” you are helping search engines categorize your site and its relevance when somebody searches for “bricks” online. The use of the word “bricks” in your domain name and your home page content will help raise you up in the search queries. It takes time to get a good page rank and laying the proper foundation now will speed up the ranking process. One word of caution: Do not go over-board using keywords—you want to design your site for people AND search engines not just search engines. Be creative about using keywords so that your text flows, is informative to people and uses key words in a balanced manner.
3. SITE DESIGN:
If you are using template based software for your website there is not much you can do to improve your site design except to make sure that all your site pages have a link back to the home page. A good place to place these links is at the bottom of each page, which say “home” so that when they are clicked they take you to your home page. The reason for doing this is when your site is crawled by search engine spiders each page is indexed. Over time each page will have a page ranking which, when linked back to your home page, will contribute those page ranks to the home page (similar to links from other sites). Long story short, it helps give your site relevancy to the search engines and this is helpful for new sites.
4. META TAGS:
Meta page title tags and meta keyword description are not as important as they once were but it is important to know how to use them and to use them well. Page title tags is what describes each page on a website and appears across the top of your browser when clicking from page to page across the Internet. The page title tag should use the most important keywords that describe the page content and are relevant to your site. For example, a home page title could be changed from “index” to “ Bricksrus, Bricks, Bricks and More Bricks” … The point being that again the word brick is being used to help search engines understand your page and business. A keyword approach should be taken whenever possible.
5. USE ALT TAGS:
Alt tags are HTML code that describes images appearing on your site. Search engines scan alt tags as they crawl through a web site and using alt tags is another great way to use keywords. Get the idea here? You want to keep building on your keywords. If you need help with HTML code, we have free info and manuals to show you how to get these things done. Just go to our site, and go to the Smart Link Zone, click on tech links and look around—you will find a TON of free information that will be very helpful to optimizing your site.
6. SITE PAGE CONTENT:
The goal is to have a TON of quality pages on your site STUFFED with text content—the more pages the better. I question the value of spending time developing page content for a page rank. Instead, design your site to benefit visitors. If you want to build up your site content, you can do so quickly by downloading articles. Put articles like this one into your site by either directly publishing the article on your site OR use the RSS feed to import the article feed into your site. Once again, another technique to build page rank and relevancy.
7. DIRECT URL SUBMISSION:
The best way to get your domain name URL registered with search engines is to take the time to manually register with the biggest and best search engines. Registering your site with Google is quick and easy, as are many other popular search engines. Be aware that some search engines want fee-payments before they will accept your site submission. My opinion is to avoid paying for site submission, it’s a racket. Registering with Google and the multitude of free search engine submission sites is the way to go. If you need links to free submissions search engines, go to our site, and go to the Smart Link Zone, click on tech links and look around—you will find a link page to over 25 free search engines.
8. LINK EXCHANGE:
When you have a new site and little or no Google page rank, it can be difficult to get good sites to link to yours because it is basically a waste of their time to do so. Why does a company like Haliburton Corporation need to link to your bricksrus.com business? They don’t and they won’t in this example. The goal is to get sites with a high page rank to link to yours. What you can do to get your site URL listed on high page rank sites is to write articles (like this one) on QUALITY Ezine directories with Google page ranks over 5/10. Doing so puts your link on a quality site. For example, notice our link at the bottom of this article. When search engines scan this directory page they will see the SBS link pointing to our site. This helps with our page ranking. An added advantage is that articles like this are picked up and published by other sites which spreads our link all over the Internet with only the effort of writing the article. It’s good for the readers and website owners, like you, who are building content for their web site. It ‘s also beneficial to us because, as you read this article you are becoming familiar with SBS, and that is promoting our site to you, right? It’s a win-win situation for all.
9. REGISTER A SITE MAP:
Develop a site map for your site if possible. This is a problem for many template-based-web site services that do not allow you to have direct access to the root directory of your domain. Why? Google requires that you upload an HTML key-code into your root directory to prove that you, in fact, own the domain name you are submitting a site map for. If you have access to your root directory of your site, by all means register a site map with Google, it will help with page rank. Again, we have easy to use site map generators in the tech section of our site as described in earlier paragraphs.
10. SEARCH OUT SEO SITES:
There are a TON of search engine optimization sites online that will give you a lot of helpful information about getting your site ranking improved. We have taken the time to find the best for you and they appear, as with everything else related to this article, in our tech link section of the Smart Links Zone on our site. If this article has overwhelmed you with terminology, I suggest you visit SBS and look around, you will get a lot of free answers…. One additional thing: Download the free Google tool bar. It has a meter that shows Google page rank on a scale from 1 to 10 which will help you identify sites that are worthy of link exchange (at least 1/10).
To your unwavering success!
Copyright © 2006 James W. Hart, IV All Rights reserved