The SEO buzzword has been
around long enough now that many small business owners are fairly familiar
with its concept. Suffice it to say that every serious website owner
should be sure to optimize at least one main page on his website.
And if you are truly dedicated to making your website succeed, you'll
probably have several optimized pages. When a page is well optimized for a
specific topic, it becomes a magnet for people searching for information
about that topic through search engines.
Optimizing a web page involves
a number of carefully planned steps:
1.
Identify the real keywords
(including phrases) that people would actually use to find the
product, service or information contained on your page. You can do
this two ways:
Visit
www.overture.com - click
Advertiser Center, then click
Keyword Selector Tool and enter the
keywords you think would be appropriate. Notice how many people
searched for the word in the last 30 days. Notice the related terms
searched for. If many thousands of searches were conducted for a
term, it means you have a LOT of competition for that word. Choose a
different word or term.
Conduct a search at
www.google.com for what you
think are your keywords. See what comes up. Review other sites that
come up and learn from them.
Conduct a search at
www.yahoo.com but do not simply
type in the keyword. Instead, drill down through the directory until
you locate the appropriate category for your site. Learn from the
sites listed there.
2.
Determine the subject of the page
to be optimized. Here are some guidelines:
The topic should describe only ONE
product or service, not several.
All text should be related to the
one topic.
Write 300 to 500 words of text so
the page will be viewed as content-rich.
Strategize the frequency and
occurrences of the keywords on the page.
For every 40 words, use one
occurrence of the keyword or term.
Make sure all text is really text
(not a graphic image)
Use the keywords in sentence form,
not bulleted lists.
Make every usage of the keywords
legitimate, i.e., do not hide groups of keywords by making them the
same color as the background of the page.
Use the keyword term in the headline
at the top of the page, and put the headline in a style called
"head" or "headline."
In the body text, use the keyword
term once in every paragraph.
4.
Use keywords in alternative text.
When you add a photograph or graphic
image to the page, right-click to select its properties and type in
alternative text that includes the keyword term. (Alt Text appears
visible to the user when his cursor hovers over the image.)
5.
Include keywords in the meta tags
in the HTML code.
Write a title for the page and
include the keyword term. Make the title eight to ten words or less.
Omit "stop" words such as "the," "and," "an," etc. Do not include
the word "Welcome" in the page title: It wastes space (and everyone
already knows they are welcome).
Write a description for the page
which includes the keyword term. Depending upon the length of the
page title, not much of the page description will be visible in a
search results listing, so put the most important words first.
After optimizing a page, set
up other pages on your site (with other narrowly focused topics) and do
the same.
Then register your site with
www.yahoo.com or
www.dmoz.org (The Open Directory
Project) and get lots of links from relevant sites, and you're on your way
to working your way up to a higher position in the search engines - the
natural way.
