subject: Steps in establishing successful search engine optimization [print this page] As part of their growth strategy, every business with a website would make effort in search engine optimization. They want to bring the site as high up as possible on google and Bing search results pages. Basically search engine optimization means finding ways to increase the site's appearance when visitors search for a particular keyword. This means that there would be more traffic to the company's website. However this is only the basics in SEO. Intense level of optimization would involve complex site restructuring by specialists in the area. But if you are in beginning stage of your business, you can take a few simple steps for increasing the search engine ranking.
You need to kick start your search engine optimization process by monitoring the search standings. Until and unless you do the monitoring, you will not know if the SEO efforts are effective. An experienced SEO company would keep an eye on the page rank using tolls like Alexa and Google toolbar. You need to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they are using constantly to reach your site. For this you need to check your referrer log regularly.
Keywords form the crux of any content that would be put up in the site. It is necessary to be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of the site including titles, content, URLs and even image names. Your keywords should be considered as search terms. Two most important spots to imbue keywords would be the title tag and page header. However this doesn't mean that the content should be loaded with keywords alone. In that case, your site would be labeled as a keyword spammer that would be easily detected by search engine spiders which are programmed to ignore such sites. So you need to be strategic in using the keywords.
The basic strategy of SEO can be attributed as the integration of internal links into company's website. In that way it is easy to boost traffic to individual pages. As and when you create new content, make it standard to link it back to your archives. The anchor text should also be made search engine friendly. If many relevant words point to a particular page, that page has more chances of appearing the search results when users run a query with those terms. Regarding other SEO approaches, make sure that your links are appropriate. And it is vital not to cross the line into excessive linking so that the visitors won't be annoyed.
URLs are the main sources that attract visitors and hence make it search friendly. They should be named with clear keywords. You need to add a site map that would list all the existing pages and also link to those pages. Thus it would be easy for the spiders to search the site. The fewer clicks to reach your website, the better result you get. While adding images, make sure to name them with keywords as the search engine spiders can only search text. So make all the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible.
Steps in establishing successful search engine optimization
