Monday, March 16, 2009

Five Tips to Help Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

5 Tips to Help Improve Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

For most companies the #1 traffic driver to their company's website is a search engine (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, etc).  In order for your company's organic listing to be seen and clicked on, try these 5 optimizing tips:

1). Optimize Title Tags on Web Pages - Meta tags appear in the code of your web pages and search engines read these tags to help determine the relevancy of a web page.  writing a good title meta tag is the single most important thing you can do to improve your SEO.

2). Create Links Between Pages on Your Web Site - Search engines used programs called "Spiders" that search the web, following links, to find web sites and pages to index and store in their databases.  
Improve your internal links by:
  • Creating a robust internal link structure among your web pages for search engines to follow
  • Use keyword rich text for the links
3). Use a Site Map - A Site Map or Site Index, is a page on your site that lists and links to all other pages on your site.  It is full of text links that gives a search engine a way to find and index every page on your site.

4). Increase Links From External Web Sites into Deep Pages - Deep pages are pages below the home page in your Site Map.  Having external site links to these pages can help them rise in the search engines' results.  Partner sites, Associations, Blogs, Tweets, etc are a good place to seek out incoming links.  

5). Get Involved in Online Communities - Another way to add external links to your deep pages (Press Releases, Case Studies, etc) is to get involved in online communities important to your customers and industry.  
Some great places to start in are social bookmarking and blog sites such as:
  • Delicious.com
  • Reddit.com
  • Digg.com
  • eblogger.com
  • wordpress.com
  • technorati.com  
The best way to track your efforts in SEO is to chart the progress of your search engine listing by creating a baseline:  Where are you now as a starting point/how far down is your listing?, where is your listing  in 1 month? 6 months? 1 year later?  

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