Search Engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component of a well rounded Internet marketing strategy. Having a great looking website is just not enough. Hundreds of millions of people use search engines every day to scour the INternet and find information from web sites just like yours. In order to appear along side your competition, your web site must be search engine friendly. Here are ten tips to getting noticed.
1. Keyword use in title tag – The number onefactor in ranking a page on search engines is the title tag. The title is what appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser. Choose your title carefully, and every page in your site shoould have a different title, relevant to the content on that page.
2. Anchor Text of Inboud Link – Anchor test is the text that appears underlined and usually in blue for a link from one page to another. An inbound link is a link on another website that links to your site. Try to get some inbound links to your pages using keywords you want to be ranked for. Two way to accomplish this is through press services suchas prweb.com or simply by networking and asking to exchange links.
3. Global Link Popularity of Site (Page Rank) – The more sites that link to you, the better. The number of pages linking back to your site is call link popularity, or in Google speak, Page Rank. Quality content is the most important factor to getting inbound links. For a site to perform well, you will need to add good quality content weekly. SEO is not an overnight process. The only way to perform well with SEO is to have rich quality content.
4. Age of Site – When was the domain of the site registered? There is not much you can do about this, but how long you have had the domain name registered makes a difference. Make sure when you are renewing your domain registration you do it for more than one year.
5. Link Popularity Within the Site – This is the number of links to a page form inside your own domain. It is also critical to use the right anchor text. You should also have a site map for your site that links to all relevant pages.
6. Keyword use in the body text – This is the keyword density of the phrase you are optimizing for in the content of your pages. Use targeted keywords in the first and last paragraphs. USe keywords in your headlines, especially when using H2-H6 tags.
7. Utilize Your Error Pages – Too often most web designers forget about error pages (such as 404 errors). Error pages should always re-direct “lost” users to valuable text based pages. Place text links to major site pages would also be an excellant idea.
