A Short Guide To Search Engine Optimization

If you’re in charge of managing a business website, you are likely tasked with driving traffic to the site, getting leads and ultimately getting customers.  You will only achieve this if your site is optimized. With search engine optimization or SEO, your site gets listed higher on search engines, which in turn means more customers.
 
Organize your site properly.  Your site navigation should be clear and concise and should be easy to navigate with a good flow between pages. Your url strings should be short keeping sub-pages beneath their main category page. If your site is a static website you should keep the main pages for each section in the main root folder. This allows the spiders immediate access, as opposed to burying them in directory folders. The rest of the pages can be put into folders, which is good for organization.
 
Keywords are important. In order for your site to rank high you will need to find the right keywords; the keywords you think people will use to find your product or service.  Like Web Design Ottawa – I want my site to appear for these keywords, so I will use these keywords in my content on the web design page as well as in my keyword listing. You can use the Google Keyword Tool to assist with this. Try to use keywords that receive high searches in a month and that correspond to websites that do not get as much traffic as yours. This way, your website has a better chance of appearing at the top of the organic search results. Search on your potential keywords, trying the various search terms and reordering those search terms to determine the results. Technical terms are more likely to bring in the results you are looking for and using synonyms is a helpful search strategy as well. Search Engine Optimization recognizes such search strategies.
 
Use quality links. All links on your site should contain content relative to your business and that someone will want to read.  If you are considering a paid linking strategy a good use of a paid link would be having your website linked to from a blog post reviewing an item you sell as this will drive quality, targeted traffic to your site. Be very careful if you’re sponsoring links!
 
Consider sending out press releases locally and/or nationally whenever you have something compelling to offer. If you do, it is a great idea to syndicate your press releases as a means of improving your search engine optimization strategy. It is easy to do and costs nothing!
 
Try to stay away from PDF files.  This is a sign of a poorly managed website, and search engines view it as such. You do not want to be seen as lazy and therefore ranked poorly by the search engines, so limit your use of PDFs.
 
The Google Approach. With Google’s approach of not focusing intently on Meta tags, try to pay more attention to title tags on your site and specifically your homepage. Your first 66 characters are displayed in the search engine rankings, so this is where your focus should lie. You need to sum up what your business is about right from the start. Save the fluff and get straight to the good stuff.
 
Invest the Effort. Quality Search Engine Optimization takes time.  Appearing first on the page ranking isn’t going to happen overnight, be patient. You need to invest quality time for quality results and you can’t do it once and forget it, you need to constantly be monitoring your results and tweaking your website content to remain competitive.  Use your Webmaster Tools and your Google Analytics tools to assist you.
 
Now that you know how to get your website on the cutting edge, get started with applying all of these search engine optimization techniques and get ready for a flow of new traffic to your business website. You’ll soon see the difference in a greater number of customers interested in your services.
 
Good luck and never stop optimizing!
 
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