Everywhere are you look in the internet, every knowledgeable
webmaster will say that one of the best way to get traffic is by
having a good website content and a well designed website with
proper search engine optimization. This will greatly help to get
free traffic from search engine such as Google, Yahoo and etc.
To have good content is basically to know well what your website
topic, plus to write the material and deliver your information
properly to the readers.
However, when it comes to Search Engine Optimization Methods, it
is totally a different ball game. Even if you know your website
content very well, it does not mean you could make the website
to be as friendly as possible to the search engine crawlers or
spiders which will index your site and determine your search
engine ranking. That is why you need to at least know the basic
knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when you are
creating a website. Many SEO company website that claim they could do
the task for you will sometimes just do the basic and charge you
lots of money. If you are big corporate company, well that is
fine. But if you are a small company or individual webmaster, it
is better to do it yourself and learn the basic. It is not
complicated as what many SEO websites claim to be, as long as
you are willing to learn.
I have listed down here
6 important SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
steps that anyone could use while writing their website. The
best time to do your SEO is when you are designing or writing
your website. But if you have created yours, just edit the pages
accordingly. The six steps are:
1. If you are not using standard website and instead using the
following
Frames,
Dynamic URL, Flash, Image Navigation and JavaScript Navigations,
then you need to worry about the search engine spider/crawler
being unable to index your site. If you are using the above,
then there are few ways to enable the crawler to index the site
properly. I have listed them in my website as explaining each
steps for each above case will be lengthy and will be out of the
scope of this article.
2. Choosing
correct keywords - what are the words that best descript your
site topic or any particular page within your website. What are
the keywords that you want people to type in a search engine
such as Google, and they will find your site. These are the words
that you need to use as frequent as possible in content of your
site. However, since keywords have enormous competition
especially when your website topic is famous, then try
use Specific Keyword Phrases
and not just Keywords. You will have a better chance to
be ranked well for specific phrases and the resulted traffic
will be more highly targeted plus much more higher quality. The
keywords need to be used as much as possible in you page
content, but don't over do it. Example of a selling collectable
baseball card website keyword as below.
Too Board
Keywords: selling baseball cards
Specific Phrase:
collectable American baseball card
Find you
competitor's website, look at their website and see what are the
keywords that they are using. This will give you an idea how to
use and phrase your keywords better.
3. Title
Tag is another important aspect that your need to consider when
you are performing your SEO. Always place your most important
keyword or key phrase in your title tag. The code for title tag
in HTML is
<TITLE>This is where you title tag should be placed</TITLE>
and it should be placed in your page's HTML code between the
<HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. Title tag is actually the phase that
appears top left corner of any website when you view a site.
4. Your
Website Content could be the most important part that your need
to pay attention while doing SEO. All your important keywords
and phrases need to be incorporated within your content as much
as you can. However, do not over do it until your page tends to
make no sense. In early days of SEO, many people tend to
concentrate on title tag, meta tag description and meta tag
keywords to get highly ranked in search engine results. However,
today's search engines are more smarter where it will look into
the content itself to evaluate a website rather than totally
depending on only title tag, meta tag description and meta tag
keywords.
5. Meta Tags were originally
created to help search engines find out important information about the
description of the page itself. Well as time past and due to
stiff competition, people start to abuse this tag by spamming the search
engine with keywords stuffed in meta tag. Then, search engine designers
have to make the search engine much more smarter and make it look at
broader spectrum before ranking a page. Many people believes that excellent meta tag is all to it t achieve good
listing in search engine. This is incorrect. The search engine will look
for a combination of all the aspects to determine a listing plus
ranking. To certain extent, some search engine may sometimes just ignore
meta tag.
Description Meta:
<META NAME="description" content="This would be your description of
what is on your page. Your most important keyword phrases should appear
in this description.">
Keywords Meta:
<META NAME="keywords" content="keywords phrase 1, keyword phrase 2,
keyword phrase 3, etc.">
These tags
should be placed in your page HTML code between the <HEAD> and
</HEAD> tags.
6. Below are
some of the things you should not be doing if you are trying to
do SEO and get your site better ranked by search engine. Doing
the below steps will cause you to be black listed by search
engine.
List keywords should not be anywhere except in your keywords
meta tag. By "list" we mean something like - keyword 1, keyword 2,
keyword 3, keyword 4, etc. There are very few legitimate reasons
that a list of keywords would actually appear on a web page or
within the page's HTML code and the search engines know this. You may have a legitimate reason for doing this we would recommend
avoiding it so that you do not risk being penalized by the search
engines. The search engine will not listen to your reasons.
Use the same color text on your page as the page's
background color. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.
Use multiple instances of the same tag. For
example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect
this and view it as spam.
Submit identical pages. Do not duplicate a page of
your site, give the copies different file names, and submit
each one.
Submit the same page to any engine more than once
within 24hrs.
Use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that do
not directly relate to the content of your page
With
these simple steps, you could perform your own SEO without
spending a dime. Paying a SEO company to perform SEO for you
will definitely cost a webmaster. Furthermore, a good website is
a dynamic site which changes from time to time. Therefore,
paying a SEO company to help you to do your SEO will only solve
your problem temporarily. This is because once your website
grows and things change, you need to update your website and
update your SEO. This means if you hire a SEO company, guess
what, you need to pay them again to perform SEO on your website.
Rahman Alwi is
the author of a website called
http://www.toliveonline.com
. The website teaches readers different online business models,
how to create your website, performing your own search engine
optimization, build your website traffics and etc. These information
are crucial for every webmasters who wants to be an internet
entrepreneur. The website is unique and shows how to start each
online business models from creating the idea to actually having
a workable website. FREE ONLINE BUSINESS INFORMATION FOR YOU !!
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