Understanding the Basics of Search Engine Optimization

When you are looking to have your web site optimized for Search Engines, there are many things that you should take under consideration, whether you are going to do it yourself or have a Search Engine Optimization company do it for you. Some of the things you want to consider when you do Search Engine Optimization or SEO are listed below.

• Watch out for Pay-Per-Click. Doing Pay-Per-Click or PPC for your web site could be beneficial, but only temporarily. PPC is different than putting an ad in a newspaper. When you use PPC for your web site, you enter a bidding war with other competitors for the keyword you want be #1 for. You might pay anywhere from 10 cents to thousands of dollars to be in the number one place.
• Go for the little keywords. By little I mean the ones that have little competition. There are different ways to find out which ones are the best keywords to SEO your web site or for PPC campaigns. One way is to take the most general, broad keyword and narrow it down to a more specific keyword phrase. For example, your website sells seeds. You might want to narrow it down to specific seeds that you sell in your store, such as fruit seeds, flower seeds, or vegetable seeds. You can narrow it down even more by specifying what kind of seeds they are, such as apple seeds, daisies seeds, bell pepper seeds, etc. You can also find out how popular certain keywords are at the Google Keyword Tool (helps you find out the competition and search volume for a keyword) or at Keyword Discovery (Keyword Research Tool).
• Do not chase algorithms. Just follow the usual way of creating web sites. Remember to add your meta tags with relevant information about your page.
• Avoid repetition and copying from other sites. There is nothing more damaging to a web site than duplicate content. Be original and create your own content. Also, avoid repeating information or content throughout your website.
• Do not submit your web site manually. Instead exchange links with relevant sites to your web site that are already coming up high in searches.
• Create pages with enough content. Search Engines want to be able to crawl your web pages and find keywords repeated through out the page. Although, you have to be careful and not overwhelm the page with the same keyword. Remember that you are writing for an audience and it needs to make sense to your visitors.
• Use regular, plain html. Search Engines like to find basic easy web sites that are easy to crawl and have good content, like I mentioned before, but make sure that the content is readable in html. Flash web sites are more difficult to come up high in Search Engines Results Pages or SERPs because their content is based in images. If you like Flash for your web site, you can create an entrance for visitors that come directly to your web site instead of through Search Engines.
• Lastly, if you would like to get more information about how to optimize your web site, you can contact us, and we will happy to talk about SEO for your business.