How to Optimize your Website - Part 4

Linking Strategies.

Once you have your pages optimized as you want them to be, you will need to get some other sites to link to your site. There are several important points to bear in mind when you contact sites in order to get them to link to you.

Google will only "credit" your site with a link from a site that it knows of, this means that you should aim for links from sites that have a Google PR score. To find out what the PR score of a site is, visit my site Search Engine Optimization and use the PR tool on the home page.

This also makes certain that you do not get links from banned or dubious sites that will in fact harm your ranking rather than improve it.

You ideally want to get a link from a page that has a related subject as this will make the link more valuable. This can be difficult as many sites will not want to advertise the competition on their sites, however there are solutions to this, as getting links from a page on a site that includes your keywords will do the trick. In many cases a site will have a directory of links or resources which will be divided into sections that may be named with something related to your site keywords.

If you want to get a head start on your link building then submit your url here and you will start to generate one way links to your site. One way links are the best kind of link to get as the GYM SE's favour them over reciprocal links.

For further information visit my site here Search Engine Optimization

Next time I will discuss linking further

How to Optimize your Website - Part 3

Titles, meta tags, alt tags etc

By now you will have your desired keywords that you want to optimize your site for. Firstly you want to include your keywords in your page Title. Keep it at 36 characters or less, and separate each keyword with a divider. Put the most important first, followed by the others in decreasing order.

These terms need to be included in both metatags, description and keywords. There are less and less search engines using the metatag keywords, but some do so it makes sence to include them. Your metatags should be limited in length, the longer they are the less effective they are, and can be ignored completely if they exceed 280 characters.

Each of your images can be labeled with your keywords by using alt text, make sure you add either "image 1", or "photo 1" etc after each line of alt text so that the GYM SE's know what you are labelling.

Where possible you want to use H1, H2, H3 headings etc as these are read and used to help your ranking. Make sure then that your headings contain your keywords.

The footer needs to be constructed so that in your footer you can make the last words on your page are your keywords, that way The GYM SE's will look at your page and see that the first and last words are the same, and your page also contains headings, metatags, images etc all called or related to your keywords and they will then rank your site on that basis.


For further information on Search Engine Optimization or Internet Marketing go to http://www.deehoseo.com

How to Optimize a website - part 2

Optimizing your page.

All optimization begins with the same thing...... CONTENT. What you write on your page will affect how you rank.

Think of it this way, Google and the other big two, Yahoo and MSN which shall from now on be know as the GYM, are looking for good sites that contain good information for their searchers. Regardless of what you may think, Google is only a machine, a machine that can only count 1's and 0's. It justs visits each site and asks questions of it. If you provide the right answers then it will rank you well, if you answer incorrectly or not at all then you will not rank at all.

The GYM sites need words in order to decide what your site is about, without then it can't tell what you want to rank for so it will play it safe and rank you for nothing.

First things first, the GYM sites can't read images, it doesn't matter how good your picture or graphic is, they will only see a blank square, so bear this in mind in your design. Also watch out for links, flash and javascript links can look very nice and can be very clever in their execution, but the GYM sites can't follow them. They can only follow simple hyperlinks, which they also read the names of as they go. This will become important in a later lesson, but for now keep it simple, or....... if you have a flash wizz bang site, add a sitemap link and list your page urls on it so that the Gym sites can at least arrive on your pages and have a look at them.

In addition to this you should create a Google sitemap, but I will cover that in a future lesson.

In the next lesson we will discuss what information to put where on you home page so that it ranks as well as it can.

How to Optimize a website

 ** UPDATED OCT 2014**

Search engine optimization can be a daunting process if you don't know what you are doing. It is very easy to upset the major search engines by doing too much too quickly so the first rule is..... less is more. Do everything in a measured, gradual manner and you will stay within Googles best practice guidelines.

For example if you add 1000 links overnight then your site will not get very far, however if Google sees your site add 80 links one month and 50 the next followed by 93 the month after that you will start to see results for your efforts.

To begin though you need to optimize you home page so that Google,Yahoo and BING  can read the page and understand what your site is all about. This requires a little homework on your part. First you need to establish your market, then see what traffic exists for your market for specific keywords, using Google keyword tool, then you need to focus your site towards those keywords. For example there is no point optimizing your real estate site for the keyword "Brick House" if there are only a few searches a month for the term. Instead look for the most popular terms with the most traffic, for that is where the money lives. Use a tool like the Google keyword planner to search for your traffic.

Once you have two or three terms or words with good levels of search traffic (12,000 per month minimum) then you are ready to focus your site towards those terms.

Tomorrow I will show you how to optimize your page.

Dave Holland is CEO of Deeho SEO one of the top ranked optimization companies.