SEO – Search Engine Optimization encompasses the practices, techniques and culture of ensuring your site content is easily found by search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. SEO is important because there are billions of sites worldwide and most people don’t even click past the first two pages of search results. This skill is crucial for any web-designer / blogger because having a site that can easily be found by search engines makes for increased hits and is a plus in every sense. Also, 65% of people never click on paid or “sponsored” results . So what should you do to drive traffic to your site?
- Titles must be short and informative. Keep titles short, meaningful and unique for each page to make it distinct and remember that most search engines use a maximum of 60 characters for the title. So, the shorter the better.
- Keywords are Key: Use short and meaningful keywords that are relevant to your content. Keywords are always known as tags and are separated by commas.
- Description Meta Tag: Make use of the description meta tag because search engines use it as a summary of what a particular page is all about. Most search engines use a maximum of 160 characters for the description.
- Use easy and friendly URLs / filenames that are easy to understand by users using them to link to their sites and by search engines to crawl. Remember that URLs are visibly displayed in search results.
- Make your site easy to navigate: Make it as easy as possible for users to navigate through your site from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Preferably use mainly text for your links and not images, dropdown menus or flash.
- Use HTML site maps and XML Sitemap file. Creating an XML Sitemap file for your site helps ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site. A sitemap bulleted outline text version of the site navigation. An HTML sitemap is useful for it allows site visitors to easily navigate a website. Sitemaps are helpful if a site has dynamic content, is new and does not have many links to it, or contains a lot of archived content that is not well-linked. Generate a sitemap for your site by going to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ it is easy and free.
- Content is King. All these optimization efforts that aren’t backed by relevant and interesting content are a waste of time and energy on your part. Compelling and useful content will influence your website more than all the tasks I have discussed here. Users who read quality content will spread the word like wild-fire. Find a niche area that is rarely covered and create your own original , unique content using your own style and not generic content or worse still copy paste from other sites. If the content is not your work, instead of ripping someone’s efforts be courteous enough to provide links and sources. Give credit where it is due.
- Eliminate dead links: An orphaned page is a page that lacks sufficient links in your website. Many posts this one included could be improved with a little extra proofreading to get rid of dead links or facts that you present that are outdated or inaccurate at the moment. What about spellchecking, looking at your grammar and formatting? Goes without saying.
- Promote your Site / Blog: Ask other bloggers to consider linking to your post, use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Wikis etc to leverage on promoting your site. You can also use newsletter / email and RSS subscriptions to cast the net even wider.
10. Tracking and tuning: Search engine optimization and promotion strategy is not a one-off event but an ongoing process, where you track and refine to improve toward even better rankings. There are many tools that can help you monitor your site by using measurable indicators and statistics. These include: Google Analytics, PageRank, Neilsen NetRatings, ComScore and Hitwise. Check the ranking of your site using the following sites www.quantcast.com ,www.alexa.com,www.ranking.com www.compete.com
If you have very low rankings, do not give up, remember content is King and SEO is a process and not an event that takes time.
What else in your view is important to know, please leave a comment here.
No related posts.
