SEO: Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines
(As published in Greater Wilmington Business 3/2007)
Previosly, we discussed Website Analytics, the art and science of determining how visitors find out about your small business website. This month, we’ll focus on how to augment the search engine component of that traffic.
As you may have done yourself, your potential customers type keywords into websites like MSN.Com, Yahoo.Com or Google.Com looking for certain products and services. If your company website pops up in the top ten or twenty list of websites on the search engine results page, the chances of them navigating to your website are greatly enhanced.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about editing the pages of your website so that they show up ranked as high as possible in these search engine results pages. The search engines engage programs, called robots or crawlers, to sift through the millions of websites out there, and categorize them. SEO helps you to make their job easier.
If you look to the right side of these results pages, you’ll see the “Sponsored Links” or “Sponsored Results” section which lists the websites of companies that have paid to pop up whenever certain keywords are typed into the search engines. This is called AddMe.com has some great tools to help you get started.
Second, edit the filename, title, description, keywords and text in your pages to be consistent and contain relevant keywords that potential customers might type into a search engine. Click here for a quick primer on how to use meta-tags .
I’d also recommend typing your website name into the following tool to analyze your current meta-tags and recommend changes.
Third, increase the “quality” of your link by contacting any and all partner companies or businesses with a similar customer base and ask if they will put a link to your website on their website. The more of these so-called “in-bound” links to your website from other high quality websites, the higher your organic ranking will be. This is called PageRank and is used by Google in its search ranking algorithm. You can see the number of websites that link to your website (your “link popularity”) by clicking here .
Fourth, you’ll want to submit yourself to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL according to http://SearchEngineWatch.Com ). This is also known as Search Engine Submission (SES) and will trigger the search engine robots to visit and categorize your page.
Finally, track the results over the next several months to see if the changes you’ve made have caused any changes in the percentage of website traffic that is referred to your website by search engines. If you are going to hire someone to do this to your existing website, costs range from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars dependant on how much of your page has to be edited and rewritten. WordWrightWeb.Com, for example, charges about $500/year to provide SES (or Search Engine Submission) services, submitting your site to major search engines on a monthly basis.
Be forewarned though: if you try to “game” the system by tricking search engines into thinking you are someone you aren’t (for example, adding keywords like “Britney Spears”) just to get traffic to your website, they will penalize you and kick your website out of their search engines. Also, typing many high-interest keywords in invisible text (white text with a white background) or “stuffing” keywords by mentioning them over and over will also increase your chances of getting penalized.
Since your website genuinely provides helpful and relevant information about your in-demand products, you owe it to your customers and your business to utilize SEO. Using the steps outlined above, you can aid the search engines in guiding potential customers to your small business website.
Previosly, we discussed Website Analytics, the art and science of determining how visitors find out about your small business website. This month, we’ll focus on how to augment the search engine component of that traffic.
As you may have done yourself, your potential customers type keywords into websites like MSN.Com, Yahoo.Com or Google.Com looking for certain products and services. If your company website pops up in the top ten or twenty list of websites on the search engine results page, the chances of them navigating to your website are greatly enhanced.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about editing the pages of your website so that they show up ranked as high as possible in these search engine results pages. The search engines engage programs, called robots or crawlers, to sift through the millions of websites out there, and categorize them. SEO helps you to make their job easier.
If you look to the right side of these results pages, you’ll see the “Sponsored Links” or “Sponsored Results” section which lists the websites of companies that have paid to pop up whenever certain keywords are typed into the search engines. This is called AddMe.com has some great tools to help you get started.
Second, edit the filename, title, description, keywords and text in your pages to be consistent and contain relevant keywords that potential customers might type into a search engine. Click here for a quick primer on how to use meta-tags .
I’d also recommend typing your website name into the following tool to analyze your current meta-tags and recommend changes.
Third, increase the “quality” of your link by contacting any and all partner companies or businesses with a similar customer base and ask if they will put a link to your website on their website. The more of these so-called “in-bound” links to your website from other high quality websites, the higher your organic ranking will be. This is called PageRank and is used by Google in its search ranking algorithm. You can see the number of websites that link to your website (your “link popularity”) by clicking here .
Fourth, you’ll want to submit yourself to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL according to http://SearchEngineWatch.Com ). This is also known as Search Engine Submission (SES) and will trigger the search engine robots to visit and categorize your page.
Finally, track the results over the next several months to see if the changes you’ve made have caused any changes in the percentage of website traffic that is referred to your website by search engines. If you are going to hire someone to do this to your existing website, costs range from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars dependant on how much of your page has to be edited and rewritten. WordWrightWeb.Com, for example, charges about $500/year to provide SES (or Search Engine Submission) services, submitting your site to major search engines on a monthly basis.
Be forewarned though: if you try to “game” the system by tricking search engines into thinking you are someone you aren’t (for example, adding keywords like “Britney Spears”) just to get traffic to your website, they will penalize you and kick your website out of their search engines. Also, typing many high-interest keywords in invisible text (white text with a white background) or “stuffing” keywords by mentioning them over and over will also increase your chances of getting penalized.
Since your website genuinely provides helpful and relevant information about your in-demand products, you owe it to your customers and your business to utilize SEO. Using the steps outlined above, you can aid the search engines in guiding potential customers to your small business website.
Labels: Search Engine Optimization SEO websites google yahoo msn
posted by slidesage at 7:25 AM
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