SEO Tips for your web site
Search engine optimisation is a crucial part of any web site. Without it you run the risk that your site will just be a pretty orphan, stranded at the end of the search engines and never found by your potential customers.
There are two distinct parts to search engine optimisation - on-site and off-site. Both are important and, if you want good results, both need to be carefully planned and monitored.
On-site optimisation is about making the content interesting to the search engines and easy for them to index. It's about building your site so the important parts are most visible to the search engine spiders. Let's go through the process.
Keywords. Keywords and key phrases are the key to SEO. If you research keywords properly you will get better results. The best place to do keyword research is with Wordtracker. This is a subscription based service (costs around £15 per week or £30 per month) that gives you the latest data on what people are actually searching for. Without it you run the risk of optimising your site for keywords no one is actually searching for. You'll then find yourself in the top 5 in Google, but no visitors or sales! Good keyword research is a prerequisite for successful optimisation.
Once you've got your keywords you need to get them in your site. Concentrate on one or two key phrases per page - no more. Work the key phrases in to your title tags, your description and scattered around the copy. But don't overdo it or you will get penalised. Try to keep the keyword density (the number of keywords as a percentage of your total wording) to around the 5% mark.
Keep your keywords up to date, which means keeping your Wordtracker subscription up to date. Keep checking you're using the terms people are searching for, and keep your site up to date. Add new copy and new pages regularly. Make sure they have been properly optimised with the new key words/phrases. But the ultimate key to good serps is fresh, well-written content, so keep working on your site.
Off-site optimisation is more time consuming and, like on-site optimisation, is on-going. If you stop you will start to lose the ground you've gained.
Start by looking at the sites who rank at the top of Google for your chosen Key words or phrases (see above). This is your benchmark. You want to do what they're doing. Analyse the links to their site. Look at where they're coming from and get contact details for the sites linking to them. Contact the site and ask if they'll link to you. Check the directories they are listed in and try to get in the same ones. Basically, you're trying to emulate what the most successful sites in your field are doing to succeed. It can be very time consuming. But it can be rewarding. If you've got enough to do already (and who hasn't!) get a specialist to do it for you. If they know what they're doing it will cost you far less than you'll make.
© 2007 SEO tips for your website
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