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15 Steps To Optimize Your Site
By seovida | September 7, 2007
15 steps to optimize your site
Website optimization means making sure that the search engines will place your web page high up in the search rankings. If you had a site on say, Golf”, if someone does a search on the keyword “golf”, your site would be seen somewhere in the first 3 pages and preferably on page 1.
How is this optimization done? There are some strategies, which if followed religiously will ensure that your page is on the top.
1. Good keywords
Keyword research is crucial to optimizing your site. It is not a plug and play operation and you need some brainpower to do it successfully. There are several tools available to help you. Our aim is to find keywords that have a good number of searches with less competing sites.
2. Competitors
It is important to know and understand your competition. Check the competitor rank, number of incoming links, the page rank of the pages that are linked to their website. This research is essential so that you can go one step further and outdo them.
3. Website title
Website optimization starts at the very beginning when you are selecting a title for your web page. Make sure you have the keyword phrase that you are planning on targeting, in your website title.
4. H1 tags
Next thing to do is work on the header of your web page. You should ensure that you have the header of your page in a <h1> tag, because of the way Google reads web pages. Having the <h1> tag to the extreme left is essential, as Google bots read from left to right.
5. H2 tags
The <h2> tags, which are the sub headers are important too. You should have the keywords that you are going to optimize your site with in the <h2> tags.
6. Keyword placement
You don’t have to keyword stuff your page. In fact, doing that can actually hurt your website. You should only have the keywords occur naturally throughout the web page in a natural flow.
7. Getting indexed
You want to get listed on Google soon? Don’t use the Google submission form, it will take ages for you to get indexed. Get a link instead from a high PR site that belongs to your niche and you will be listed immediately.
8. Inbound links
Getting several similar quality sites to link to your website gets you higher rankings quicker. You should ensure those sites are considered as quality sites in Google’s eyes.
9. Article submission
Writing articles and submitting to article directories is a great way to optimize your site. Depending on the niche of your website, research and write informative articles and submit to top ranking article directories. Choose a few good directories and submit one article per day.
10. Blog posting and forum posting
Post relevant comments on related blogs and forums with high PR, with a link back to your website. This should see very targeted visitors coming your way, if you ensure you make helpful posts.
11. Navigation links
You know that Google reads web pages from left to right. There is an exception to the rule. Do you remember the navigation links on the left hand column of the page? Google will read those links from top to bottom first before reading anything else. That’s not what you want. How do you make Google read the content first? There is a small trick. On the very top of the navigation links, we put an empty column. When Google see there is an empty column, it proceeds to read the content first.
12. Nomenclature
A very good optimization technique is to save all your web pages and images, using the keywords in the file names as well as an ALT attribute. There definitely seems to be an increase in ranking when this is done.
13. Site map
A page map is said to be very important to rank well in the search engines, because of navigation made easy with a page map. Since all the pages of the website will be internally linked to the sitemap, it makes it possible for the web spiders or users to find content easily.
14. Robots.txt file
Including a robots.txt file is a great idea to make web spiders to crawl. All you need to do is open the notepad and type in “User-agent: *”. Save this notepad as robots.txt and upload to the ‘root’ directory on the domain. This command is used to tell the search engine spiders that they can crawl on all the pages of your website.
15. Validate SEO
At the very end, how would it be if you knew how your site looks to the search engine spiders? You can find free tools on the web for ‘analyzing’ your site. For example, Scrub The Web’s tool helps you see your website with the eyes of the search engine spiders.
An good example of a site that has great optimization is www.seovida.com. Some of the above website optimization tricks and tips may be less known than others, but work very well and you should see your website at the top of the search engines very soon.
Topics: General |
February 21st, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Thank you for the seo tips. I found them useful
David