subject: 3 Step Search Engine Optimization (seo) Fundamentals [print this page] Google plays a big part on how customers find your website. The importance of having a good ranking in Googles Search Engine cannot be emphasized enough. If you do not wish to engage a search engine optimizer, these 3 step fundamentals let you tweak your website for Google yourself.
Step 1 Keywords
Find out how your customers do their search in Google when looking for products or services you are offering. For example, whether they type in running shoes or sports footwear in the Google search bar makes a difference in how you need to pick your keywords. A keyword can consist of 1 word, or multiple word phrases. In the case of running shoes, The best spiked running shoe for the sprinter may also be a keyword searched.
Pick a few keywords that best suit your business. You may do this by surveying a few of your customers or friends and get the more commonly used terms. Of course, if your industry is a niche, using jargons or industry term may have the better effect of bringing in more targeted viewers.
After selecting the keywords, run them by Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find out the estimated monthly searches globally as well as locally. Doing this will tell you an estimate of how much searches are done for the keyword you selected, how competitive the keyword is, and perhaps some more keyword suggestions that your customers are also searching for.
Step 2 Using these keywords in your Website
Content is king! The information on your website is what attracts the viewer into your website and keeps them there! The key is to design your website with your human reader in mind, not the search engine. Luckily, when doing so, Google also recognizes your efforts and sees your website as a valuable resource to your customers as well. How?
Placing keywords strategically in your web copy not only helps the reader find the information he needs, it also optimizes your website as well. The human eye finds information by scanning the website, when he finds your keyword, then he might wish to ready further. It is therefore important to have your keywords available in titles, headers, in the first paragraph, and once every while in the other paragraphs as well. You should also use bold, underline or highlight the keywords when necessary to let your reader identify what the page is about.
It is also important to write a summary with the keywords for the page in the meta description of the meta information tag. Although this summary within the meta tag does not appear on your site, it might appear on the search engine listing page as a snippet directly under the link to your page. This benefits the human user as he can at a glance look at this summary on the search engines page below deciding or not to click to your site. So make this description relevant.
Step 3 Link Building
Incoming links from other websites are considered by Google as a vote of approval from the website and it will help to improve your pagerank. Pagerank(PR) is a system developed by Google and calculated by a algorithm based on the number of incoming links. Links from relevant sites weighs more than non-relevant sites and links from sites with higher PR weighs more than sites with lower PR. Also, one-way incoming links are better than two-way reciprocal links.
Concentrate on building links from reputable sites, or sites of non-competitors that talks about your product. For example, a sports shoe manufacturer may request the Sports Council or Sports association to link to them. If your site provides information that is beneficial to the users, they may agree to put a link from their site to your site.
