Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing a website for search engines so as to obtain better search engine rankings. There are a number of “crucial step” that need to be executed in the correct order with utmost precision in order to maximize the effectiveness of your search engine optimization campaign.
Below, we will discuss these crucial SEO steps in detail.
Step 1. On Page Optimization (OPO)
The first step in search engine optimization (SEO) is “On page” optimization (OPO) or sometimes also referred to as “on site” optimization. This is a very crucial part of search engine optimization that is often overlooked by many search engine optimization companies. This on page optimization consists of optimizing the content, the HTML tags and the URL’s in order to satisfy search engine criteria. If these on page elements are not optimal, search engines like Google, Yahoo! or MSN may de-value or even de-index your website or certain pages within your website as they do not for fill their criteria. In this case, it does not matter how much SEO you do for your website, you will never reach high search engine rankings for competitive key terms where your competitors do have optimized pages.
Therefore, the first step in a successful SEO campaign is to evaluate the following elements within your website and find the elements that need to be improved before moving to the next step in search engine optimization:
1) Titles
2) Meta tags
3) Headings
4) Alt tags
5) Structure
6) Utilization of emphasis tags
7) Outgoing links
8) Contextual links
9) Footer text
10) Dynamic content and multimedia
11) File names and URL’s
12) URL re-writing
13) Utilization of JavaScript
14) Utilization of executives
15) Site architecture and site maps
16) HTML validation
Step 2. Link building and promoting your web pages to search engines
Step 2 in search engine optimization can take a number of alternative pathways depending on the ultimate goals of the SEO campaign. An SEO expert can often advise in the optimum steps that can be taken to achieve desired results faster, which will mean a better return on investment (ROI) for your SEO campaign investment. Typically, in most SEO campaigns, the logical step to take after on page optimization is to commence link building and link baiting for your optimized website pages. This ensures that the pages that have just been optimized are presented to search engines in the most optimum way. Although this is quite a complex process, basically, what it does is increase the popularity of your website pages to search engines. In other words, the more inbound links your website or web pages have, the more popular they will appear to search engines and hence the higher they will rank. However, link building in an incorrect manner can seriously damage your existing rankings. This is why link building should be left to professional link builders who have learned from experience.
The best links that one can build to their website or web pages are called ‘one way links’ and these are incoming links to your pages that search engine spiders follow. If the content (or theme) of the web page where the link is situated, the anchor key phrase and the landing page relevance match in the right proportions (and this is one of the most important aspects to quality link building), then the link will provide value to your website or web page and search engines will value this.
Step 3. Content building
Since search engines value textual content, adding content to your website is crucial for optimum search engine rankings. Adding content to your website can be achieved in many different ways. Here are some of the most successful ways to add content to your website or web pages:
1) Start a blog. A blog or web log is a great way to add quality content to your website. Content management systems like Word press offer a free and easy way to add content to your pages and also offer the added features of presenting this new content to search engines in a friendly way with the addition of some nice SEO pluggins.
2) Write articles and build out your domain by creating new search engine optimized web pages with key word rich articles that will ultimately rank on their own for the keywords they focus on.
3) Describe your products with text. If your website has a lot of images to display your products for example, it is a wise idea to describe all your products with an article of 100-300 words which focuses on the key words describing the product.
4) Please text in your website footer and header. This can be just a few sentences which repeat throughout your website and appear also on low content pages to give these pages some added content. Because the content is repeated across the same domain name, search engines will not penalize you for this.
5) Add a forum. In some cases, it may be wise to start a forum. Visitors will start to discuss topics on your forum, which will add indexable content to your domain. A good business forum software to use is vBulletin.
6) Make you menu descriptive. Too many people underestimate the value of ‘anchor text’. Anchor text is the hyper text that forms the link you click. This words found in this text is highly valued by search engines, more so the non-hyper linked text. Therefore, when forming your site menu, use descriptive links that describe with key words the pages they are linking to.
There are many other ways to add content to a domain or web page but the ones above are a good place to start.
