Search This Blog

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Essential SEO Tips

By Linda Surefoot

As more companies realize that the phone-book is a thing of the past they are turning to Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However when you do some research on SEO you find a daunting amount of information on how to go about improving your website. In addition to the people trying to sell you services, you will also find a host of poorly written information that is misleading or often just plain wrong. So how do you go about starting your SEO activities? This article will give you some typical approaches to improving your site.

First, it's necessary to commit to the optimization process. Search rankings will not improve over-night and sometimes can take many weeks to months to see any real movement in search results. If you're trying for a local term that doesn't have much traffic then, obviously, it will take far less time to obtain the desired result.

Do research for keywords and key-phrases. Building a site around poorly constructed or poorly researched phrases is a recipe for failure. The first component to a successful SEO campaign is proper research. There are free tools available like Google Keyword Tool or WordTracker that provide some analysis of keywords. The key is look at the volume of each word or phrase comparative to others. The more volume usually means the more difficult the phrase would be to obtain due to competition.

Organic SEO changes to actual copy on your webpage are also easy and can boost your ranks. The right phrases in the right places can mean Google will see you are relevant to the topic searched for. Page titles are probably the most important factor and should be unique to the page you are attempting to market. Meta descriptions on a page are also key and tell the users and the engines more about the content on your page. And finally, you should include your targeted phrases and words on the page itself where relevant.

In addition, properly constructed anchor text if useful to improve your on-line visibility. Try using your keywords as part of any anchored text. Using things like "Home" or "Read More" are meaningless from an SEO perspective. Also, including proper anchor text between your internal pages and to your home page works to help Google better analyze your site.

Finally, content is going to be a very important factor. If you create a poorly organized site or one that doesn't contain anything useful, you can expect poor results. Even if you can attract a large volume of traffic to your site, those users will go elsewhere if they're not satisfied with yours. Quality content extends to off-site tactics also. Submitting to article marketing sites with poorly created content may provide some benefit but if you're content is well written, it will be far more effective.
About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment