How to Search Engine Optimize your Website

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of increasing your websites position in the organic search engine results pages for keywords and phrases that relate to the content of your website. SEO is a powerful marketing tool because it provides highly targeted traffic to your website that the consumer understands to be algorithmically considered the most relevant content – thus providing an authoritative status for your business and new visitors to your website that are interested in your offerings.

Search engine optimization is a complicated area which has much hearsay and uncertainty attached to it. Despite that, enough is known about how search engine algorithms operate to effectively manipulate results through making changes to your website, and making changes in terms of how other websites link to yours. As your business grows it is best to consult a search engine optimization specialist who will have had experience in dealing with a large range of sites, however until that time you may wish to consider giving it a try yourself if you are on a limited budget.

Keyword Strategy – Selecting keywords is the process of choosing words and phrases that you feel would lead to the most targeted traffic visiting your website. If, for example, you own a cleaning business, you may wish to rank in search engines for search queries such as New York Cleaners. Not only should you consider which words are the most relevant to your business, you also need to consider search volume. If you use a keyword tool you will be able to find out how many people are searching for queries that you feel could deliver targeted traffic. Use that information, along with how targeted the traffic is likely to be, to develop a list of keywords that you would like to rank for.

On-site SEO – When you have developed a list of keywords that you would like to rank for, it is now time to incorporate those keywords into your website. You should make changes to the content of your website to ensure the keywords and phrases you would like to rank for can be found within. Some people choose to create specific pages that they aim to rank for specific keywords. Once you have added the content into your website you can also increase a pages relevance for a specific keyword by making changes to the code of your website. For example, you may wish to change your title tag so that it contains keywords, add keywords to your Meta tags and add keywords to your description tags.

Linking – Linking is the most important aspect in deciding which pages should be ranked when both are relevant to a search query. This includes links within your website, as well as links from other sites to your own. The anchor text of links also helps search engines to define your websites relevance to a search query. Therefore when you link to an another page in your website with the anchor text “cars” you are making the search engines comprehend that it what the page is about.