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Search Engine
Optimization: Getting Started
By Joe Garite II
Okay, so you’ve got yourself a nice website and your advertising
campaigns are starting to bring in some customers. But what if there was
a way to advertise without paying for it? Would you take the time to learn
about it? If you answered yes than keep reading. If you answered no than
you can continue to pay for your advertising campaigns barely making profits
and never increase your revenue.
I am going to explain some of the first steps to get your website not
only optimized for the search engines, but to push your website up in
the rankings war. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and maybe a muffin and
take out your pen and paper, lets start brainstorming.
First you need to categorize your website. Figure out what category it
is best suited under. For example if I am selling computer programs that
aid web designers, I would categorize my website under Computer Software.
That was easy enough right? Okay, now comes the difficult part. You need
to pick one, just one, keyword or key phrase that you want to base your
homepage on. Focusing on one keyword/ key phrase makes it more valuable
in the page in which it is located. The value of the keyword/key phrase
is known as weight. You want your pages weight to hold 2% of the keyword/key
phrase. This sounds easy, but it’s not. Let me tell you how to do
this.
The TITLE tag
First is the most important part, the “< TITLE >” tag.
This is the number one item to use your keyword in. If I were to give
my website selling computer programs that aid web designers, I may use
“< TITLE >Computer Software for Web Design< /TITLE >”.
Although it contains a “stop” word (for), the top key phrase
I am trying to work with is before that word.
The META tag
Than there are the META tags. Simply put, these tags go inside the “<
HEAD > < / HEAD >” tags in your html. They allow the search
engines to pull up your website using the keywords and describe your website
using the description. Without these tags, you simply can’t have
your website pulled up in the search engines.
The ALT tag
Next is the ALT tag which is used in images on your website. If you wanted
to put “Computer Software for Web Designers” at the top of the
page using a font that I know nobody else has, I would have to use an
image. Inside this image I would use an ALT tag called alt=computer software
for web designers”. Although the ALT tag is not as powerful as using
the natural text itself some cases can’t be avoided.
The Body
We’re almost done. This isn’t hard at all right? Okay, so now
that we have our HTML side optimized its time to work on the side that
users see. When doing this, you need to be careful not to over use the
keyword/key phrase but you need to use it enough to give it the weight
it needs to be considered important. This is the tricky part. One good
way to do this is to use it in your links whenever possible. Search engines
like to see those types of links at the top of the page, so if you can
use text links instead of images this would help your weight increase.
Don’t forget to also include them at the bottom of the page. Although
it is less effective, it does help. The other way is to include the keyword/key
phrase into the body. For example in the sentence “Use it to help
you make a better website” I would say “Use this computer software
for web designers to assist you in making a better website”. Make
sure you don’t go crazy with the keyword/key phrase, if you use it
too much the search engines may “sandbox” you assuming you are
spamming.
This concludes the beginning steps to Search Engine Optimization. There
are many ways to raise your rank in the search engines. In future articles
I will explain how to advertise for free using your area of expertise.
Until next time…
Joe Garite WebReality.net
- Building Dreams, One Pixel at a Time. Joe Garite has been in the industry
of Web Design since 1997. Althought it's a short time, much has been learned
and now much is being taught.
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