The
Absolute Basics of SEO
Copyright 2007 Matt Canham
Search engine optimization
is the process of maximizing the ranking of you site in search
engine listings. The most important factors to consider to achieve a
high ranking are: the keywords you use, your title, your
description, the text of your site, and the links others provide to
your site.
To begin selecting keywords, consider what words and phrases the
people you are trying to reach will be searching on. When placing
keywords in your keyword tag, it is best to use phases rather than
single words. Almost all single words are in very widespread use,
thus will not tend to produce high rankings. Keyword phrases can be
better tailored to your business. Also, since phrase searches
produce fewer results, people are more likely to search on them. It
is also a good idea to produce a list of keyword phrases for every
page of your site. If you must include difficult to spell words, it
is a good idea to include some common misspellings of these words as
well.
The title is just as important, if not more important, than your
keywords. Most search engines place the highest level of importance
on the words found in the title when calculating the ranking. You
should place your most important keyword phrases first in your
title, as some search engines limit the number of characters you can
use.
Make your title a readable sentence, as this is the first
text that will appear for your listing on the results page. One
thing you should avoid doing is simply listing keywords. This could
be regarded by the search engine as keyword spamming, and may lower
your search ranking, or even get your listing removed from the site.
As with keywords, it is a good idea to give each page a unique
title.
In your description you should once again make use of your best
keyword phrases. In this case, you can use more of them, since
search engines will give you typically around 1024 characters for
the description, while they will give you only around 50 to 80 for
the title. Again, place your keywords as close to the beginning of
your description as makes sense.
In the text of your site you should make use of, yes, you've
guessed it, your keyword phrases. Also include any text you have
used in other tags, such as meta tags, alt tags, and headings.
Having a lot of content helps as well.
A minimum of 200 words per
page is recommended. Having many pages of content also increases
your rankings.
Having many other sites link to you is another good way to
increase your search rankings. Both the links themselves and the
increase traffic which results will help. Also, having bloggers link
to your site is a good idea.
Although these practices will boost your rankings, there are
certain design elements that can interfere with your search
rankings. These include frames, dynamic URLs, Flash, using image
maps for navigation, and using java scripts for navigation. Also,
there are certain practices that search engines regard as spamming,
and these practices will get you permanently removed from the site.
These include using keywords in your meta tags that do not relate to
the content of your page, using multiple instances of the same tag,
and listing keywords in the text of your site.
This is just the briefest introduction to search engine
optimization. One book available on this topic is Search Engine
Visibility, by Shari Thurow. Software packages that can assist you
with SEO tasks include Bruce Clay's SEOToolSET and Web CEO's Web
CEO. If you prefer to have
someone else do your SEO for you,
Mariner blue is ready to help you for free with your .ws domain.
Regards, Matt
Matt Canham
Copywriter and Internet Marketer http://www.ws-domains.marinerblue.com
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