In the time before time when Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Bing) were evolving your website wasn’t doing much on the web except stick out like a sore thumb. Well, maybe not quite the case for some of you although as we are living in a digital era the importance of your web presence has a great impact on how it appears to your visitors. In most cases alot of website owners are confused and simply have no idea about Search Engine Optimization. Hopefully by the time you finish reading this post you will at least have a general idea of what your website is missing. It’s the one type of optimization that you can not afford to exclude from your website!
SEO Delivers FREE Traffic to Your Website
So, you have a website and you are ready to take on the World by driving traffic to it. You have heard about this thing called Search Engine Optimization and you are eager to get started optimizing your own website. Before you dive in and make a mess that you’ll regret cleaning up later perhaps you should gather some facts on how to approach and at what angle this particular website optimization method! SEO is all about fine tuning and precision in the way you present your content to the search engine spiders. Once your website is officially up and running on the web and registered under a valid domain a search engine robot will crawl your domain anonymously around 15-30 days post launch. While there are exceptions to this time frame pending on the individual search engines robots such as GoogleBOT, YahooBOT, and BingBOT, for the sake of this post I won’t go into much detail on that. During the crawling process of your domain the search engine robot will be looking for certain types of components and details that your website page should have in order to meet minimal requirements.
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Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines
Discussed below are a few key elements that you will want to take into consideration when optimizing your website and in particular individual pages of it so that it becomes Search Engine Friendly. There are far too many tips and guidelines for SEO although the basics listed below should get you started.
Meta Data
- Title Tag – each individual page of your website should include a Title Tag that signals the main point or subject that you are discussing in the main content area. The ‘Title Tag’ of each individual page of your website should look something like this <title>Your Page Title Here</title> The importance of this tag is that this will be the actual hyperlink that the user will see and click on when searching in Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other minor search engine Focus on being as specific and transparent so that if the searcher finds this result significant and after reading your Title Tag they will click thru into that particular page.
- Description Tag – this particular tag should be a short description about what the visitor can expect from the page that they will be viewing. Remember that you want to be as brief and transparent as you can to let your visitors know the type of information that they can expect to be viewing after they land on your page. The Description Tag line should look something along the lines of <meta name=”description” content=”Your description line here”>
- Keyword Tag – this is perhaps the second most important tag that each page of your website should have as it lets the search engine spider know what type of information your web page is discussing. You will want to include keywords that match and are mentioned in the body content area of each individual page of your website to ensure that the search engine spider can probably relate them to your content. The keyword tag should look something like <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword3″>
Content
- Main Headings – a search engine spider likes to distinguish the difference between a Main Heading (Title) or Sub-Heading (Sub-Title) when it crawls individual pages for your website. Make sure that each individual page of your website includes at least one Main Title Heading that signals the main keyword and subject that you are informing your visitor on. A Title Heading tag should look like <H1>Your Title Heading Here</H1>
- Sub Headings – search engines and their spiders both like to segment out titles within the body content area of your web page. Therefore you must remember that following your main Title Heading in your body content area of your web page you should include your sub-headings or secondary titles. These should look as follows <H3>Your Sub Heading Here</H3>
- Body – presenting the content to your visitors can be tricky although far more complicated for the search engine spiders. The one most important thing that you should remember is that you want to present your content material, products, or services in a human friendly manner. Keep the technical jargon to a minimum and the industry terminology on low key. Present the content in a way that’s easy to read and flows like a river.
The proper Search Engine Optimization of your entire website and individual pages will yield in the delivery of organic traffic from major search engines. Following the basic key components above will help you get one step closer to acquiring free traffic in as little as 90 days post the crawling completion of your website via the search engine spiders.