Do
It Yourself SEO
By Matt
Colyer
Internet
surfers use search engines more than any other tool to find things
online. Search engines rank their results using a complex formula
that considers web page content, link popularity and other details.
This is why you should Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your web
site.
First
before you start you need to identify your keywords. It is critical
that you know and understand the search terms surfers will use
to find your web site with. If your not sure yet try thinking
of search terms you would use to find your site. After you find
your keywords make a list of about 50 (If you can find that many)
keywords and target them.
Next
you need to identify your competition. Start searching with your
site's targeted keywords and research the top ranked competing
sites. Create a list of the top 10 to 15 sites and review each
one of these web sites. While reviewing each of the competing
sites look at the SEO methods that they use.
Meta
tags are thought by most to have little impact, If any at all,
on your site's ranking, but is still recommend to use. It's better
to be safe than sorry! The meta description tag is used to describe
a web page's content to the search engines. Most search engines
(Google, Yahoo!, etc) get the web site's description from the
web page's content and not from the meta description tag. Write
a description of your site here and make it short.
The
keyword tag tells the search engines what keywords are related
to your site. You should place your main keywords here and add
no more than 15 keywords. The Title tag is probably one of the
most important SEO techniques today. Not only will the search
engine's spider see this, but also the surfers. Place your main
keywords in it and be creative. Don't make it longer than it needs
to be.
Keyword
density is a key part of SEO. On each page write approximately
200 to 500 words. Write it with your targeted keyword phrases.
Remember not to over due it and get banned from the search engines
for spam or make your visitors hate you. Put your keywords in
bold and in the heading tag. Try to get a density of 5 to 15%.
If your not sure what you keyword density is try using http://superiorwebmaster.com/webmaster-tools/page_primer.php.
Search
engines will not only use links to find new sites, but they'll
count each link to a site and use this to determine how popular
that site is. What you want to get is quality links. These links
should come from web sites that are related to your topic. Don't
exchange links with every site you can. Take time to check each
one before exchanging links. Make sure they are a clean and professional
site. Look to see if they use spam.
Other
thing to consider is to make sure HTML is valid. Spiders are somewhat
like the browser you use, they read the HTML to display the web
page. If your HTML code contains errors, spiders might not be
able to find the content on the page. Although most spiders will
try to correct minor errors in HTML code, it could still hurt
your ranking. Visit w3.org to have your HTML code validated.
Matt
Colyer is the owner of the Superior
Webmaster. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.
Article
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