» Search Engine optimization - 10 steps to follow
The art to successfully increase the rank of your website is a true science with no overnight solution. Some people believe you have to pay to be listed in the top of the search results. This is not true for the majority of search engines. The websites listed on the top are listed there because they are ranked higher and more relevant to a particular keyword search, by that search engine, than the websites listed below.
There are however separate areas for advertisers such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsorship Ads that you can pay for, but the main search area is normally free to be listed and one can increase their page rank by effectively performing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for their website.
One thing you must understand is that it takes time to find what works for your site. If you make a change, you'll have to wait until it has been indexed in each search engine in order for you to effectively assess if the change has positively or negatively affected your page rank.
Below are ten steps to follow in order to increase your page rank in the major search engines. If these are followed, you will be sure to increase your rank. For help or more information on increasing your page rank, contact Hudson Horizons today.
- Be Legitimate – Most search engines analyze your website to
determine if you are trying to manipulate their engine in any way. Do
not do this. I repeat, do not do this. Be legitimate about your search
engine optimization otherwise you will be penalized and your page rank
will decrease, no doubt about it. The following Search Engine
Optimization tactics should be avoided at all costs.
Do NOT do the following:
- Keyword Stuffing
- Hidden Text
- Cloaking
- Doorway Pages
- Redirects
- Duplicate Sites
- Interlinking
- Manage Page Titles - A page title is the heading of the page
that will be listed in the search results when your site is located. It
is also the title that will be displayed on the top of the browser
window. It is important that each page contains its own unique title
that is relevant to the content of that page. Having the same title on
every page will not do you any good. The search engines might not
properly index each page if they see your pages all have the same title.
But on the other hand, if the engines see that each page has its own
unique title, then it will realize each page is different and will index
them accordingly. Also, make sure that the title is relevant to the
content within that page.
- Manage Meta Tags – Meta Tags are information placed in the
HTML header of a web page, providing information to a search engine that
is not visible to a user. The two most common Meta Tags, relevant to
search engines, are the keyword and description tags. It is very
important that each page contains separate keywords and descriptions
that are relevant to the content of that page.
- Google and Yahoo Sitemap Submission - Google and Yahoo
Sitemaps offers a way for you to submit all your site's URLs to their
search index to improve the visibility of your pages. With Google and
Yahoo Sitemaps submission you can keep them informed of all the pages in
your website and if done on a regular basis, provides fresher search
results and a smarter crawl of your website.
- Content Development – Content is the key to success with SEO!
With good-quality content, that's relevant to your products and
services, you will be liked by the search engines. When a search engine
crawls your website, it analyzes the content on each page and saves a
copy to their index. When a search is performed it will lookup your site
and determine if its relevant to the keywords being searched for. With
short, poorly written content it will be difficult to be listed on the
top few pages of a search engine.
- Write Articles – Writing articles and adding them to your
website is a great means to providing more relevant content on your
website. This will help your customers by providing them will relevant
information in your industry while helping to index your pages. Be
creative with you articles and be sure to list keywords and key phrases
together that you feel prospective customers might search for.
- Good Internal Linking – It is vital that the internal links
of your website are search engine friendly. Search engines easily pick
up basic HTML links unlike links generated by fancy scripting, commonly
used in drop-down menu navigation. Also, to help a search engine crawl
every page, all sites should include a sitemap page, which categorically
lists your page names and an HTML link to each page within the site,
providing the search engines with a page to easily get to and crawl
every page in your site. If you have over 150 pages, you should create
separate categorized sitemap pages for each set of 150 page links.
- Reciprocal Linking - Exchanging links with other websites is
an ok way to help increase your rank. It's not the best way but it may
count. It's important to try and exchange links with more popular
websites. A search engine will analyze the links on other websites that
point to yours and determine the ranking of their website. If a poorly
ranked site has a link to yours, it will not affect your ranking. But if
you have a link on the homepage of a popular site like Yahoo pointing to
your site, then it will definitely have a positive impact on your page
rank.
- Patience – Patience is very important. It takes time for a
change that you've recently made to be indexed in the search engines.
You must be patient to see how your recent change or addition has
positively or negatively affected your page rank. Submitting a sitemap
of your URLs to Google and Yahoo will greatly increase the rate at which
your changes get indexed.
- Do Not Overdue It – Sometimes it's better to do less than more and in some cases more will harm your page rank because search engines may see you as trying to manipulate their search engine and penalize your site. Follow all of these Search Engine Optimization tactics but start small and do not overdue it.
Source: http://www.hudsonhorizons.com/
