Tips for a Great Website

SEO is a HUGE buzzword right now in the Internet world. I however like to take a simplistic approach and view of what it is so that you can quickly understand how it actually works and benefits your website.

It’s no longer the “old days” of the Internet where you could fill your pages with hidden code containing relevant, and irrelevant, keywords and key phrases. The days of tricking the search engines are gone.

The search engines have gotten smarter over time and now they look for relevant content.  But I think this makes it much better for searchers and site owners. For one, when someone does a search the results will return websites relevant to the search word or phrase.

The basics are outlined in the following 4 steps. If you make use of these it will improve the success of your website gaining a higher ranking. Keep in mind, the most important aspect of all this is that your site’s content is relevant to the keywords you use…and vice versa.

Things to Do:

  • Page Titles -Write a descriptive title for each page of up to 8 words. Don’t use words like “a”, “and”, “the”, etc. Make it as descriptive as possible because this is what people see when they find your site in the search engines.
  • Meta Tags – Develop the html META tags search engines use to find out information about your site and get entered between the tags of your pages.
  • Keywords Brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases that you think people might type into a search engine to find your site, list every one that you can think of, get friends to help. Then refine the list to the most important. Page Description Write a 50 – 75 character (including spaces) sentence or two. Keep it short and to the point.
  • Page Names – It’s not only the domain name that is important. Page names after the .com are just as important. Stay away from Page1.htm.
  • Page Content – develop keyword rich content. It’s not enough to simply have your keywords in the meta tags. Your website should support your meta tags

Please keep in mind that it takes continuous work on improving your site ranking; it’s not just a matter of plugging in the right words and phrases and walking away. You will want to make use of Google Analytics to know what you can/should modify your keywords to. If you’re a social maven, then you want to make use of Facebook and Twitter to help draw folks to your site. You’ll want to get linkbacks from other sites and  blogs.