SEO and Your Website

Search Engine Optimization has become the most important aspect of web marketing as it applies to getting visitors to your website. To date, there is a vast amount of information, guidelines, and rules for developing successful web optimiation.  Putting all of these great SEO tools into effect is rather simple - its keeping your company up-to-date on the surplus of new data and information pertaining to SEO that gives us abit of a run for our time and money.   Just a few of the key concepts behind SEO are listed below (just keep in mind that there’s a lot more where that came from):

1. Key words.  Key words are your bread and water of the SEO survival guide.  Yes, SEO is all about the words, but most importantly, its about which words your using and how your placing them.   IF you don’t choose the right keywords, they won’t even be skimmed during a search.  Check out various sites that help provide inforamtion and assistance on how to improve the quality of key terms your using in your SEO implementation.   There are several sites that are good for this. Check out a favorite of ours at, Keyword Discovery
2. Title.  A good title with your main keywords is important. For instance Westchester Web Design is an important keyword I link to. So I have that in my title as the first thing.  I also include my companies name in the title as well.
3. Header Tags.  It’s important to have header tags with key words in them as well. Google wants to give users who are searching the best possible site that is relevant to what they’re looking for. *hint* Make sure you only have ONE h1 tag!
4. Description Meta Tag. Although these are becoming less and less important, it’s still important to have a good description.  Make sure not to forget about those key words, and make the description relevant to what the page is about. Key word meta tag – One mistake users make is that they pile up the keywords in their key word tag. Sometimes google will look at this as spam and will automatically disregard your site. Watch out for that! Content – It’s important to have your keywords within your content. Again to not overwhelm the paragraphs with keywords, but make sure you have a decent amount.
5. Use title and alt tags for your images. It is important not to have too many images on a page because google cannot read the image. Alt & Title’s are another way for google to see what the image is.
6. Inbound Links – Inbound links are links from other websites that link to your website. Google looks at this as a ranking system. The more links you have the more important your site must be. However, there is a trick, because it actually does matter which sites are linking to yours. If you are linking from a website that as a google rank of 0 and you have about 20 of these, it won’t do you as good as if you had 1 link from a website with a google rank of 5 or higher.
7. Pages Index – The number of pages indexed by google, along with the amount of inbound links & your traffic rank determine what your overall google rank is. Pages indexed is very important, so the more pages you have index the more important information google thinks you have. That is why blogs are a very big - plus because google will spider each and every one of your pages within your blog and trust me they add up.
8. Create a sitemap for the users- It’s important that you have easy navigation so people can follow, and sitemap is where you have every page on your website listed. This will allow all web crawlers to quickly find the content that is needed for users.
9. Include a robot.txt file – All you have to do is open up text edit on your computer such as notepad and type in: User-agent: * and then save the file and name it robots.txt and place it in the root of your website (where your index file is). This will tell all robots to index every page of your website. If you want to make sure the spider doesn’t index certain files and folders (particularly ones that have nothing to do with the context) you will want to place underneath the user-agent* -> Disallow: /folder or file name/
10. Include a sitemap.xml for search engines. This is a file that will allow search engines to view all your pages. Here is an example of what the sitemap should look like: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc><lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>

Tags: Black Rhino Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Online Marketing, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.