Optimize Your Website – Easy As 1, 2, 3

December 7, 2009 · Posted in SEO

Optimize Your Website – Easy As 1, 2, 3
By Lisa M. Francis

Imagine opening up a small store front on a busy street with no obvious front door, no signs – nothing to indicate you are open for business, nothing to attract passersby to walk inside. All around you other businesses have bright flashing lights, colourful signs and inviting window displays. It would be no surprise if this innocuous business attracted no new customers. Having a website without the most basic optimization is really no different. Even though your virtual store front is in front of thousands of potential customers – you need to get their attention before they walk inside, or click on your site.

In real estate they say “location, location, location” determines success. The Internet is no different, however, the location is represented by where your business shows up on the search engine listings. The higher on the list, the more traffic you can expect to visit your site. It does, however, remain a mystery to many site owners how to control their positioning on the search engine listings.

The key to getting a good position is to “convince” the search engines that your site is relevant and is EXACTLY what the customer is looking for. A potential customer goes to the Internet, types in their search criteria, and the search engines return a list of sites that it “believes” will match what the customer is looking for; the more “relevant” sites are listed at the top.

Although the exact algorithm that the search engines use to determine positioning is kept secret, we do know that it is based on a combination of keyword usage, page rank, and the number and type of back links. The strategy considers both on-site and off-site activities. Since the on-site strategies are the simplest to implement, these will be the focus of this article. Implementing on-site optimization will probably not move your site to top positioning but it can make huge and immediate improvements in your site’s location and ultimately being found online.

Before you begin you must determine which key word or key word phrase you are targeting. There are many free tools online that will help you select the best keywords. These tools show you the number of searches made for a word or phrase. Select a keyword that represents your business well, that has a high traffic volume. Suppose you owned a plumbing business – do people search for “plumbers”, “plumber” or “plumbing”? The keyword tools will help you find which combination will provide the largest volume of traffic.

If your business deals primarily in a local area, be sure to include the town or city name in your key word phrase. For example plumbers in my home town of Calgary would do well to select the key word phrase “Calgary Plumber”.

There are three places within your website that you want to be sure are optimized with your keyword or keyword phrase.

1) Title

The title of your home page will not only be displayed in bold on the search listings, it is also used by the search engines to determine if your site is relevant. It is therefore, a good idea to have your key word phrase in the front of the title. Using the same plumber example, assign the Title “Calgary Plumber | Joe’s Plumbing” where Joe’s Plumbing is the name of the business.
The Title value is assigned using the Title meta tag. You can work with your web master for assistance on setting this tag.

2) Description

There is another value that should also be optimized, the Description meta tag. The value assigned here is displayed under the Title in the search listings. The search engines also look here for key words so be sure to include your keyword phrase within the description. It doesn’t matter if the words within the phrase are together as long as they appear somewhere within the description.

The description should not be more than 160 characters otherwise many of the search engines will cut it off affecting the presentation.

3) Website Content

The search engines love content. It is a good idea to have lots of good text on your page with the keywords or phrase used as much as possible. The more times the key words are used, the higher the density and the more relevant the website becomes.

In the past, many overzealous web marketers abused the key word tags loading them with keywords that actually were not relevant. Recently, the search engines have changed their strategy and are now paying closer attention to the actual content displayed on the website rather than the keyword meta tags.

It is important to note that images and video may make your site look slick and sexy but they can actually work against you as far as the search engine ranking. Remember – search engines love lots of relevant text! The search engines cannot read text inside images or video so they ignore them or worse, they may stop searching the page if they get “hung up”. They may miss your relevant text below.

There are rumours that the search engines will soon be adjusting their algorithms to take into account the time your website loads. Faster websites will be rewarded higher positioning. Therefore, sites heavy with video and images may be penalized based on load time.

Taking the first steps to optimizing your website can make the difference to having your website being found online and attracting new clients. We know that over 1 BILLION local searches are performed online every month… and growing over 50% every year.

An optimized website and effective Internet Marketing strategy is mandatory to get noticed online. Yesterday’s marketing approaches are not only expensive, but increasingly ineffective Re-directing your advertising efforts towards an innovative Internet Marketing strategy ensures long term viability in today’s changing environment.

Lisa M. Francis is a founding partner of http://www.CalgarySEM.com, an Internet Marketing company specializing on innovative marketing strategies for local markets. Lisa brings nearly 20 years of computer technology experience ranging from systems development, project managment, website implementation and Internet marketing.

CalgarySEM.com provides a wide range of services leading their clients to explosive growth by leveraging the power of the Internet.

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