10 Steps to SEO Your Website – Search Engine Optimization Guide

Firstly – What is a Search Engine?
It is software, which searches for information on the Internet and returns sites, which provide that information. A search engine searches online database of internet resources within a flash and returns with relevant data. It has several components: search engine software, spider software, an index (database), and a relevancy algorithm (rules for ranking).

Secondly – Why optimize the search engine operation for your site?
Websites are made and launched to ensure that people read it – so it is essential that traffic to the site be generated easily. Search Engines are the best option for getting traffic free of cost. In fact, they bring the majority of the traffic to any website. Therefore, it makes sense to have a Search Engine Optimized site to ensure easy and speedy traffic generation.

Thirdly – How do we go about doing that?
Generally, speaking, there are ten things that help search engine optimization for ant website. They are –

• Content of the Website – The content of the site should be good – with formatting that is easy to read and matter that make people come back to the site often. Paragraphs, Highlights, Bold and Italics all help Search Engines.
• Keyword Optimization – There has to be a list of keywords that are likely to be relevant to get the traffic to the site. The website pages should have rich in those keywords.
• Descriptive page and meta tags - Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Add a descriptive page and Meta tags to your webpage. It is a good to use of the main keywords when writing the description so that the reader is hooked on the page easily.
• H1 Headers - Place targeted keywords in H1 headers. That gets search #Engines attention easily
• Alt tags on images –Images and graphics are nice but they should not overpower the textual content. If you have pictures on your site, use alt tabs to link them.
• Internal Linking – You have to add text links to the bottom of your homepage and maybe elsewhere also, linking to all you main internal pages together with a sitemap to your internal pages. It works best if you can get many websites to link to your site. Most Search Engines, especially Google, have an algorithm that gives the website more importance if other websites link to it. Very simple. It can be a very long work; there are softwares in the market to help. One can also go for link exchanges – with various sites helping that.
• Easy to navigate – It is always better to have a site that is easy to move around in. It holds the users’ attention and they spend longer there. If buttons are used for navigation, there needs to be text links at the bottom of the page so that search engines can index all page easily.
• Monitoring and updating – The website needs regular updating with fresh content. The visitors will be happy to come back regularly and engine spiders (crawlers) get easily attracted to sites that are regularly updated.
• Avoid “black hat SEO” - “Black hat” SEO are attempts to sort of trick the search engines to come to your site assuming there is some content which is actually not there. There are various ways of attempting such deeds – through Title spamming, URL Cloaking, Tag spamming, Hidden Text are some of the things totally unacceptable to the search engine crawlers.
• Ordered and unordered lists - They are more important that the general textual content of the site. They also help visitors that “scan” for information. The anchor text should be clearly used to guide other site to your site.

Search engines evolve daily – getting better at detecting duplicates, finding ones that are really useful. So one has to work really hard to ensure the website they launch is perfectly Search Engine Optimized for best results. And that is not all. You have to maintain your website regularly.

About the Author

For more information on search engine optimization, please log on to http://www.smartimeinc.com. Smartime Inc. is a leading web designing, development and hosting company providing large assortment of services like web designing, site maintenance, Site marketing, promotion, Ecommerce, software development,SEO etc.