Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

admin — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:59:49 +0000

When designing websites, one must always keep in mind the SEO aspect of the site. Many clients have often said, i’m not getting the traffic insofar as high numbers. What you want to remember is that its not QUANTITY its QUALITY that you are searching for. If you owned a construction company in the Rio Grande Valley, would you rather have a thousand people a day that have found your site by typing “construction” in google, or would you rather have 5 people a day that have typed “construction in the RGV”. Those 5 people are looking for YOUR company, not the 1000 others who may be in a different geographic area, and would have no use for your services.

So when I am speaking of SEO, my goal is not to have a large number of people coming to your site, I’m referring to QUALIFIED traffic, that is, traffic that you can convert to a client.

The following tips will probably help webmasters who are looking to integrate SEO into their designs. However this information can help the end client in evaluating their own sites, as well as evaluating the quality of work delivered by their webmasters.

1. The Title Tag This is usually in the header portion of the webpage, between the Tags. Basically its The keyword phrase. The phrase can be your company name, and most of the time thats what it is, but if your company name does not reflect what you do, then I would recommend you use your keywords in this area. It should not be more than 5 or 6 words, and you should definitely NOT repeat the same word over and over. If you are using a CMS this functionality should already built into it.

2. Metatags. These are usually in the portion of the site, and there are various different types of metatags. Here are the basic ones that I like to use.

3. Headings. What I mean by headings is the

tags. This is what search engine bots look for to determine the SUBJECT of the page being spidered. I have seen many webmaster simply take text and make it bold or “strong” but not enclose it in an

tag.

4. Content. Ok, while the above will get you noticed and cataloged will, its the content that will give you a lot more credibility on search engines. Writing a 3 or 4 hundred word page, such as about us, or services is what your traffic is actually looking for. You want to make sure you use your keyword phrase at least twice within the content of the site.

5. Backlinks. This is the dirty little secret to SEO. Backlinks are links from other sites to your site. Lets say you have a friend who has a website, and as a favor, has added a hyperlink to your site. If your company name is “Acme” and his link to your site says “Acme” then you DO NOT get the full benefit of this backlink. The best backlinks are the ones which are titled with your keyword. So lets say that you have construction company in South Texas. The ideal backlink would read “Construction in the RGV”. This link would be far more helpful than the first one. Also, feel free to submit your friends page which contains the link to google, msn, and yahoo for cataloging. Submitting pages to the search engines is very easy, and FREE. The easiest way to do this is to go to google and search for “ADD URL”. The first entry in the results is the page you want to go to to add the site.

6. Outgoing/Incoming links. This is more of a common courtesy with SEO benefits if done correctly. I used to have a website dedicated to the geographic region where I live. I created a page called area links in which I posted outgoing links to other sites in my area. I then contacted the webmaster for those sites and informed them that I had placed a link to thier site, and in the same email, I requested a backlink. I nice jesture is to include the html code for them to simply cut and paste onto their sites. I spent an entire afternoon doing this, and was able to generate about 100 backlinks. This shot my website’s ranking to the top of the search engines in no time flat. Incoming links to your site can be viewed as testimonials attesting to the fact that your are the authority for that keyword phrase. The added benefit of having outgoing links is that google does not want to send people to dead links, So it measures outgoing links from a site as part of that site’s relevance within its subject matter.

I hope the above was helpful. I will be adding links to useful SEO tools on the net, but for now, as long as you have covered the above bases, you should be well on your way to getting a great rank on your keywords, and of course, get quality traffic that will boost your business.

Thanks, and thats it for now.

Kennedy Media Group

Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)