Search Engine Optimization
What does search
engine optimization or SEO mean for a website owner? Creating
a website is just the first step in achieving success in Internet
marketing. But more important is making the website search
engine friendly so that they can locate your website.
Today 90% of surfers wanting to gain information,
shop or identify products on the web use search engines like
google, yahoo, msn etc. Generally surfers on the internet
use the product name or then general keywords or key phrases
to locate websites. So getting your website on top for the
specific keywords / phrases in the leading search engines
is very important for web promotion. Only then will customers
be able to locate your web site & then the chances of
a sale increases. What use of a great product on a beautiful
website, offered at great price but not found by the prospective
customer.
Hence search
engine optimization is the methodology of increasing the
visibility of your website to the buyers & increase sales.
This is the cheapest & most powerful marketing technique
to have hit the global industry.
Some of the SEO techniques are explained
below, but that’s not the end of it……
Identify Highly Searched Keywords with respect to
your product
Identify highly searched and targeted keywords/keyword phrases
related to your site. This should make the main theme of your
website in terms of the content. Make sure the density of
these words are at least 10% in your content. This will make
the search engines realize the importance of these keywords
vis-à-vis your website. But make sure they are not
just punched in between text but should make proper grammatical
sense. Search engines are smart enough to identify spam quickly
& filter out your site.
The website Domain name should contain main keyword
Though not the only criteria’s but
surely it does help to have the website domain contain the
main keyword, for eg, if purple widgets is the main keyword,
a domain name such as purple-widgets-shop.com would be helpful.
Content is king & keyword rich
content would be king of search engines
As explained above the best friend of all
search engines is content…not just any content but meaningful
content bejeweled with the main theme keywords that you have
identified.
Create maximum pages giving knowledge about your products
& make sure the keywords are present in those pages. The
best way to go about is putting up articles & also inviting
others to put general articles on to your site so that the
quality content increases.
Make pages on each of your products, detailing their features
etc.
Meta tags – Title is of prime
importance
The title plays a major role in search
engine optimization. The tile should be made using the main
keywords identified & should not be spammed. Repeat words
in title is not advisable because it reduces the density of
that word by half. Study the titles given by the top 5 competitors
coming in top for searches using your target keywords. Ideally
the tile should not contain more than 60 characters. Other
meta tags like keyword & description can also be given.
The magic of back links
When google.com was first thought of by
the founders, their main theme was when site A gets a link
from site B & site C, then the relevancy & importance
of site A increases cause it is being referred by two different
sites. Hence the links can be used a s a measure of importance
of the web site.
This became so popular & the ideal way of measuring a
sites relevancy that today most search engines look out for
the number of back links that your website has over your competitors
before ranking you. Better is to get back links from similar
theme websites…viz. a widget site would get more relevance
if it has backlinks from other widget sites than from a gaming
site or carpet site.
Back links make a huge impact on your search engine ranking
& can shoot you up to top positions, provided it is backed
by quality content.
Get listed by manual submissions
& don’t use automated softwares
There's no point in using those 'submit to millions' services
as only a few search engines really matter. Using those services
may actually cause your site to be penalized by these major
engines. In fact if you've done enough important reciprocal
linkings, you don't even need to submit your sites since spiders
which crawl your link partner sites (already indexed) will
pick up your link easily. Get listed into directories like
dmoz etc cause they have high value in search engines like
google, msn etc.
Keep monitoring your web site &
analyze using web stat tools.
Once you have done the hard work of optimizing
your website for the engines, it is very important to keep
monitoring. There are many tools which will help you study
your web site stats with respect to the number of hits, the
number of visitors, the key phrases they used in the search
engines, the referring search engines, the operating system
used etc. All this will help you keep tweaking your websites
& keep you one up on competition. Cause remember, every
other competitor website owner would be using all these search
engine optimization techniques & if you don’t keep
modifying, then you will be left behind.
So, apply SEO on your website now &
see the huge leap in sales in the future!
