Search Engine Optimisation and Submission

What is search engine optimisation?

Search engine optimisation and submission, or SEO, is a set of best practices to make your website appear prominently on search engines like Google, Yahoo! or MSN Search. These best practices allow search engine programs, known as robots or spiders, to crawl your website and analyze it. It’s an important Internet marketing tactic designed to get your site a higher ranking in search results; a good goal is having your site appear within the first ten results of a particular query.

Although several search engine optimization techniques require a great deal of knowledge and are used mostly by large companies with thousands of web pages, there are many effective tactics you can apply to your site by yourself. Here is a list of the most important basic search engine optimization practices you should have in mind when preparing your website.

Choose your keywords wisely

Keywords are the foundation of your search engine optimization, strongly affecting the relevance of your site to queries people put into search engines.
It is important to choose effective keywords, specifically targeted to the type of business your site represents. At its simplest, choosing keywords is all about balance. Concentrating too much on ultra-popular keywords that all your competitors may use may not make your site stand out. On the other hand, choosing obscure keywords that no one looks for won’t generate any interest at all.

An excellent strategy is to pick a good keyword, and then use a number of synonyms for it as well. This will improve your site’s visibility for users who search for the exact thing you offer, as they usually don’t perform just one search, but tend to use several equivalent terms.

Obviously, shorter keywords are more popular (e.g. two-worded keywords like 'real estate' are more popular than three-worded ones like 'Atlanta real estate'.) So if your site is devoted to pet and veterinary supplies, for example, you may want to optimize your site for “pet supplies”, “veterinary supplies” and “pet products”, rather than for “useful veterinary and pet supplies”, “pet and veterinary stuff”, etc.

Another thing to remember: optimize one page for each keyword you target. And never, ever overuse keywords repeatedly in your page for the search engines. Instead try to focus on keeping the content easy to read.

Tagging your way into search engines
Search engines look at html tags to determine the relevance of your web page to a search query. These tags are mostly inside the HEAD section of your document, and can increase or decrease the ranking of your site.

The most important of these are the TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORD tags. Make sure that your keywords are inserted into these sections. At the same time, you should try not to overcrowd them with useless or redundant words. It’s generally a good idea to keep the TITLE tag shorter than 75 words, and have one different title for each page in your site. This helps search engines and directories categorize your pages.

The DESCRIPTION tag should contain a short and to-the-point description of the page. It’s a good practice to keep it under 100-150 words. Try to include your primary keyword here, but no more than once.

The KEYWORDS tag is where you put the keywords you included in the page. You should separate each one with a comma-and-space combination, and by no means include any word more than three times. Also, only use words that appear in your page’s body. Generally, it’s a good idea to keep this tag under 250 words.
Note that keyword-stuffing the KEYWORD tag is an abused technique, and as a result many search engines simply ignore this tag. 

Content is king
Search engines only analyze text content. Try to keep additional elements such as images or flash animation at a minimum, because search engines cannot read this type of content.

If you have to use a Flash site, include an html version to make it easy for the search engines to index your website. Again, search engine spiders don’t see your site as regular users do, so you’ll need to impress them with your text, rather than visual elements that are so important to your human visitors.

For unique content inside the page, you should have a minimum count of 200 words, preferably with your targeted keywords placed at the top of your content and in bold. But don’t forget your message: unique, relevant and interesting content is THE most important element on your site. Create good material for your site visitors and you’re on the right track. Great content inspires your visitors to bookmark, refer or link to your site. And that’s excellent for business.

After your site is "search engine ready", we will submit it to 400+ search engines, directories and other popular web site indices for 12 months.

Contact us for a free search engine optimisation and search engine submission consultation, and an obligation-free proposal.
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