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Calgary Software Application and Web Development Articles |
Optimizing Your Website for the Search Engines - 7 Easy Tips
If you want search engine traffic to your website you must learn how to
optimize it correctly. Most people do not understand this and never get
all the fantastic free traffic that comes from the search engines. This
article explains the basics of optimizing your website for the search
engines.
Visitors find websites in several different ways. One of the most popular ways is to do a search for a keyword phrase.
Therefore for you to have a chance to get some of that traffic you need
to show up in the results on a search engine for as many keywords as
possible. You can do this by optimizing each of the pages on your
website for a different keyword phrase.
The biggest error that many people make when optimizing their site it
not targeting any specific keywords. Not only that but they really
never understand what keywords people are searching for to start with.
This is probably the single biggest mistake you can make. You should be
developing a keyword list that is hundreds or thousands of words in
length. Then you should be optimizing each page each around an
individual word and only that word or phrase.
You can become an Internet spy and look at some of the pages of your
competition. Most of the websites that rank high on the search engines
have done an excellent job of targeting individual keyword phrases.
To understand how difficult it will be to get a top ranking in the
search engines take a look at the websites that are on the first page
of Google for your keywords. You should not copy them specifically, but
you can use them to give you exact examples of what search engines are
looking for in terms of an optimized webpage.
You may not be able to beat your competitors on some of the more
competitive phrases, but you will be able to quickly get on page for
lesser searched on phrases if you optimize a webpage for those.
These are known as longtail keyword phrases and can bring you excellent
targeted traffic, as you get on page 1 for as many different ones as
possible.
Setting up a webpage for a targeted longtail keyword phrase is very easy to do. Here are the things each page should contain.
1. Include your main keyword phrase in the title tag of your web page.
2. You should include your keywords in the meta tags for the
description and keywords as well. Meta tags are not as important for
the majority of search engines these days, but it doesn't hurt to at
least list the keyword phrase that you're targeting for that page.
3. As you develop your webpage you should include headline tags and
your primary keywords should be in the first headline tag (H1 tag).
4. In the text of your page you may also want to bold, underline or
italicized some of the keyword phrases in the first paragraph, and in
the last paragraph.
5. Be sure to include your keyword two or three times throughout the web page, including the top and the bottom of the page.
6. If there are any graphics on your web pages you can include your
keywords in one or two of the alt attributes in the image tags.
7. Write your web pages for visitors rather than only considering the
search engines. If you write unique high quality content you have a
much better chance of getting traffic from the search engines.
In summary, the best way to go about optimizing your website for search
engines and get as much free traffic as possible is to target specific
keyword phrases and set up individual webpages around specific keywords.
This is not nearly as complicated as it sounds and can bring you a tremendous amount of traffic when done correctly.
About the Author:
Suzanne Morrison is the webmaster of Higher Search Engine Rank and author of 10 Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Rank
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