7 Search Engine Optimization Strategies

Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking.

However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives.

1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized

Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices:

- Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages.

- Use of cloaking

- Excessive automated queries to search engines like Google Web pages loaded with irrelevant words

- Keyword stuffing

- Multiple pages, sub-domains, domains with substantially duplicate content

2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases

Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not.

Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines.

In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases.

3. Optimize Title and Meta Tags

According to Internet Marketing Articles, One of the important steps in search engine optimization is to optimize Title tag in your web page. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag.

Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag. Currently, it does not applicable to Google though.

4. Optimize Website Content

All search engines place emphasis on your body text content. The main content of your web page should contain the keyword a considerable number of times to make the search engine spiders feel that the content is relevant to the search query. The first two paragraphs are extremely important in search engine optimization.

To prevent your site from being regarded as "over optimization", you should not stuff keywords heavily in your body content. We suggest that you should present the keywords in a natural way. Apart from this, your website copy should have at least 200-250 words.

5. Ensure Clean Coding

To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase.

In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well.

Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop search engine spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your search engine optimization effort.

6. Link Building

In case you have a little bit knowledge about search engine optimization, you likely know that link popularity is very important to attaining high search engine ranking in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc..

Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Therefore, the inbound link is regarded as a "positive vote" to your website. The more inbound link you have, the higher is your link popularity. This can boost your search engine ranking.

However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, your site will get more benefit.

There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building.

7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content

Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced search engine optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website.

Another simpler way is to create a sitemap and list all dynamic URLs on it. This can help a bit.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is very important to search engine marketing. When it is done properly, it helps you attract many targeted visitors to your website, and can improve your business results.

Written by Jimsun Lui from Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd., a company offers Search engine optimization and search engine positioning service, and is developing PHP Shopping Cart Software, visit http://www.agogdigital.com to learn more.

---

SEO For Ecommerce

Ranking well under the free listings in the major search... Read More

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount... Read More

Optimze Your Web Site on a Shoe String Budget

Let me start off by saying I'm not a marketing... Read More

You Have More Web Sites Than You Think You Have: The Importance of Deep Submission

If I ask you how many web sites do you... Read More

Linking for Fun and Profit

Well actually, linking isn't fun at all. In fact, it's... Read More

Tread Towards A Successful ?Internet Research?

Internet is a terrific resource containing billions of web pages... Read More

SEO Help: Dont Try to Fool the Search Engines

Writing articles is all the rage these days on the... Read More

What is Google Talk ?

The advent of Internet has affected lives of almost the... Read More

The Modern Day Search Engine

The first task most netizens do when they log on... Read More

Surviving the Search Wars ? Local Directories

The pursuit of online information has become an increasingly dynamic... Read More

Optimize Your Site Pt1

Listed here you will find the five of the most... Read More

Arrogant Overture Placing Greed Ahead Of Their Customers Needs

According to the dictionary, the definition of the word "overture"... Read More

The Hottest Tip On Getting A Web Site Listed Quickly by Yahoo, Inktomi, MSN, FAST and AltaVista

Every webmaster knows that the free search engines are a... Read More

Search Engine Copywriting: Focus on One Topic

Perhaps the simplest of all the lessons I have learned... Read More

Google Traffic Report Card-Does Your Website Pass? Part 1

This is part 1 of a 7 part series that... Read More

The Ultimate Free Google Ranking Tool

The first months my website was online, I was constantly... Read More

Website Promotion: 10 Search Engine Optimization Blunders to Avoid

If you want to develop a successful search engine optimization... Read More

Surviving Googles Aging Delay

Google has always been the search industry's innovator and that's... Read More

Search Engine Optimization for Beginners

If you are confused about terms like "search engine optimization"... Read More

Google Patent Application - SEO Highlights

The recent patent application filed by Google details numerous items... Read More

Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website - Step 4: Content Optimization

Welcome to part four in this search engine positioning series.... Read More

How To Get Listed In Google For Free

Google does not accept payment for inclusion in their main... Read More

Answers Count - Matching Keyword and Phrase Density

What's more important to your business success - the question... Read More

An Ethical Alternative to Doorway Pages

Definition: A doorway page is content created specifically for the... Read More

The (Not So) Shocking Truth About Getting A High Search Engine Ranking

I have seen my site hit #3 at Google, and... Read More

Speed Indexing - 3 Steps to Getting Your Website Listed in Google Quickly

Getting your website listed in Google quickly simply requires that... Read More

How Search Engines Connect Sellers and Buyers

Maggie knows how to find what she wants. She lets... Read More

Sales And Crawlers, Update! Update! Update!

The importance to the algorithmic web crawlers that speed throughout... Read More

5 Simple Steps to Great Search Engine Rankings

Having your website rank well in the major search engines... Read More

Website Copy-writing for Higher Sales and Higher Search Engine Ranking

Why, you ask? Mainly, because search engines want to provide... Read More

A Classified Way To Drive Business To Your Web Site

There are more than 105 million of them in the... Read More

Keep Your Web Site Content Relevant

Visitors and search engines love content-rich web sites, but just... Read More

The Long And Short Of It Is That These Two Sales Techniques Are The Same

With the Internet beginning to stand up and be counted... Read More