SEO - Building a Successful Website – The Basics

Content



Content on site is a must. The more pages of relevant content your site provides, the more pages the search engines will index. Index pages equal search engine saturation. The more pages of relevant content you provide on your site, the more of an authority you become to the spiders and bots.



Linking



This is another important way of getting your site seen. By trading links with other relevant sites, you reinforce your sites content, thus making your site "important". The more relevant the links you trade with, the more important your site becomes. If you are a gaming site trading links with a pharmaceutical site, you are not going to appear very relevant to the search engines.



As it sounds trading links is a link swap.. you post my link on your site, I'll post yours on my site. However, there are places you may "purchase" a listing without reciprocation.



Remember, the more friends a person had in high school, the more popular they were. Link exchanges are a similar concept. The more links you have (remember, stay relevant) coming into and going out of your site, the more �popular� your site becomes.



What's your Niche?



Narrow down your topic. �Computers� gives a Google search result (as of this moment) of 1,720,000,000... the chance of being found in that ocean of results is about a good as finding a penny in the Atlantic ocean. Narrow down your topic, get more specific. A search for laptop computers receives a Google result of 106,000,000 - that's better, but still an ocean. Get the picture?



Build your keywords around your niche. If you are aiming your site at light weight laptop computers, build your keywords around that... "Computers" as a keyword isn't going to be very helpful. Get specific.



Articles



Writing articles and listing them on free reprint article sites allows for other web publishers to print your article, with your author byline in-tact. Author byline would include a link(s) to your site(s). This gives "links back" to your site.



Become an Authority in your field. :)



There are also paid article submission sites. The more you pay, the higher in their site your article is placed.



Remember, basically what you are doing is offering your knowledge and free article for a link or advertising for your site.



Blog



A web log (later shorted to just blog) started as an online journal for personal websites, but have begun to infiltrate the online business world. They give a business a quick, easy way to update several times a week, daily, or even several times a day. Search engines like blogs because they are typically updated often. Therefore, they send their spiders to those sites that are most frequently updated.



There are blog directories to which your blog could be listed � free.



Keywords, Site Description, Title



Make sure each page has a relevant page title, relevant keywords and a good over-all description.



Search Engine Smarts



Search engines look for site relevancy. Each page must relate to the site topic/theme. Each individual page must have a specific topic. Where possible, name the page specifically for that topic. If your page is about Light weight Sony laptops, name it accordingly. Ex: http://www.yoursite.com/light-wieght-sony-laptops Note: Hyphens signify to spiders and bots separate words.



Make use of h1, h2, h3 tags header tags within your content pages. Why? This tells the search engine bots and spiders that this is keyword, a relevant topic.



Use title tags in any links and alt tags in all image tags.



Use CSS to style a page - this reduces clutter within the page code making it cleaner for the spiders and bots to navigate the pertinent information. Too much clutter and the spiders and bots are likely to hit the road.



Frames are NOT search engine friendly. They are difficult for spiders and bots to index, because of the way they are put together. If you want to optimize your site, ditch the frames.



Flash - it's flashy, visually fun, appealing to some... but it's a killer in the search engines. Spiders and Bots cannot read flash. If they cannot read your page, how do the index it? Again� when it comes to optimizing your site, if search engines spiders and bots can't read the file, why bother? Just because it looks good? Sure, ok� but if the search engines can�t or won�t spider your page, and you aren�t in the index, no one knows your site is out there, who is going to see it? You have a great looking site sitting there doing nothing.



Splash page - this is the page you come to that has a cool flash file, cute image, etc and says "Enter" (or similar). Re-read the Flash information and ditch the splash page.



WWW or not?



If you type �www.microsoft.com� and �microsoft.com� into your browser window, you get the same page right? We see it's the same page, we know, as site builders they ARE the same page. But search engine bots and spiders DON'T know that. They view with and without www as two different sites.



Why does this matter? If your site is out there on the web with both links, you stand the chance of penalization from certain search engines - they view it as duplicate content. Duplicate content don't typically get indexed, at least, not very high in the rankings.



The work around on this is a redirect, or an .htaccess mod rewrite. Tell your server to point to one page, either with the www, or without it. Ex, point to www.mysite.com and when someone types in mysite.com (less the www) it will automatically add the www to the link.



Is it absolutely necessary to do this? Maybe, maybe not, maybe one day the search engines will be programmed to view with and without www as the same. Until then, do you want to take a chance the search engines dump all your pages because they can't figure out which is the original?



Advertising



How many times have you moved past the first couple of pages when doing a search? Chances are, not very often. Yet, as a site/business owner, it may take forever and a day to get your site to the top 20 in a search engine for any given keyword. Are you ready to get your name out there NOW? Consider advertising on the major search engines. Google has Google Adwords, Yahoo has Yahoo! Search Marketing. Both will get you listing within the first couple pages, depending on your willing bid amount.



Newsletters



Now, you have visitors coming to your site. Is your site sticky enough to keep them coming back?



How many times have you been to a site you liked, wanted to browse more� so you bookmark it, never to return again. Life is busy, we forget. And you lost a visitor and potential customer.



Offer a free newsletter subscription. Entice visitors to join by offering free tips, valuable information, free products, etc. Once a week, or every other week, send out a newsletter to encourage and pull those subscribers to your site. They may turn from a newsletter subscriber to a customer.



Judi Cox is a work at home mom living in the Ohio Valley with her husband and 4 children. Judi�s interests include working websites (two of her websites www.momslittlegarden.com and www.mommamuse.com). She enjoys gardening for fun and for the birds, playing with the kids, reading, website design and promotion.