Search Engine Optimization for beginners

You have probably guessed by now that Search Engine Optimization is about what your website says not only to your customers but also what it says to the search engine that is indexing it and thus ranking it for its search results.

The following tips are where we start with our optimisation techniques:

1. New Site: If possible, start with a site that has never been near the search engines.  It is often very difficult to effectively apply search engine optimization to a site that has been in search engine rankings for many years.  Some sites that link to your site will not change their linking text when you optimise your site and this can reduce your rankings.  
   
   
2. Keywords: Those elusive phases that you think your customers might be using to find just that product that you sell.  How do you know what words are right for your site and what your customer is using to find them.  Research into the keyword phrases that your site is optimised for will pay dividends with regard to ranking your pages in the search engine listings.
   
   
3. Write Copy: Write keyword rich copy for your site.  The search engine ranking that you achieve will be based on the relevance of your copy to the keywords that customers are looking for.  It is no good having a page about "dingdongs" when your keyword is "Red Widgets"
   
   
4. Killer Title: Ensure that your Title tag is all about your keywords. Search engines ranking  has a lot to do with the wording in your Title Tag.
   
   
5. Link Text: Work on the text of any hyperlinks you have in your copy and ensure that the page that it links to is relevant to that link.  Again, search engine ranking places a lot of weight on the relevance of your link text and the relevance of any links and the text that comes from links outside your site.
   
   
6. Meta Tags: Meta tags are important along with the meta description, they must reflect what your site is about and are often used in the search engine ranking listing to describe your site.  (Meta tags don't seem to have much use in ranking your site but they are often used for the description of your site)
   
   
7. Submission:  Be careful when submitting to sites that use human editors to add sites to their listings.  It is often easy to get your site listed but difficult to get it changed when you update your site.
   
   
8. Patience: It takes time for your site to start working its way up the list to the Top Ten in the search engines.  Many months will pass as your link popularity increases and more sites link to you.  Be patient!
   
   
9. Updating: Constant tweaking will not have a visible effect on your site.  Make alterations in regularly programmed steps so that you can see the effect it has on your ranking.
    
10. Expertise: Use a professional company to do the work for you.

What to do after optimizing your website

Once you have optimized your website you are now ready to start using it to attract your audience - your customers.  But the problem is as we have outlined above, it takes some time for your site to start rising to up the rankings of the search engines so how do you go about ensuring that customers are going to come to your site straight away.

There are some simple steps for you to take:

1.  Once you are sure that you know what keywords are actually being looked for on the web, (use www.wordtracker.com ), you can use pay per click advertising to get your website at the top of the search engine listings. 

2. After a time, a couple of months, you will start to see results.  Use this information to evaluate both your keyword phrases and whether your website is actually doing what you expect of it.  (Are you getting any increased sales?)

3. Ensure that your website is optimised for the keyword phrases that come top of the list.

4. Start building link partnerships with other companies that are non competitive to your products and are willing to host a link to your site.

5.  Start building up a database of how well your website is doing in the rankings of the search engines.  This will tell you if your optimisation has had the desired effect.

6.  Adjust your site depending on the results of the above strategy.