Webmaster Papers








7 Search Engine Optimization Strategy


Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making your web pages search engine friendly so that search engines are more easy to understand and analyze your website. Consequently, your site has a better chance to gain high search engine ranking.

However, please be reminded that high search engine ranking is not your only objective, and your objective should be website traffic and conversion. The following advice helps you to achieve the objectives.

1. Make Sure Your Site Will Not Be Penalized

Webmasters realize the importance of attaining top search engine rankings. Hence, they perform many search engine optimization activities on their sites. However, improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines. To avoid your website being penalized, webmasters must not commit to the following practices:

- Use of hidden texts or hidden links on web pages.
- Use of cloaking
- Excessive automated queries to search engines like Google
- Web pages loaded with irrelevant words
- Keyword stuffing
- Multiple pages, sub-domains, domains with substantially duplicate content

2. Select Correct Keyword Phrases

Correct keyword phrases allow you to drive targeted visitors to your website. Therefore, this step determines whether your search engine optimization effort can improve business result or not.

Do not restrict yourself and be open minded in this area. You may think that most of the search is coming from 1 word keyword. However, it is wrong. Most people uses 2-5 words keyword phrases because they are more descriptive and yield precise results from search engines.

In addition, think creatively and perform linguistics research can help you generate useful keyword phrases.

3. Optimize Title and Meta Tags

One of the important steps in search engine optimization is to optimize Title tag in your web page. Pages with the keywords appearing in the title tag are often assumed to be more relevant to the search query than others. Remember, title tag is the most important location of a web page after the main content of the body tag. Almost all search engines give importance to this tag.

Some search engines also give importance to the presence of the keyword in the meta description and keyword tag. Currently, it does not applicable to Google though.

4. Optimize Website Content

All search engines place emphasis on your body text content. The main content of your web page should contain the keyword a considerable number of times to make the search engine spiders feel that the content is relevant to the search query. The first two paragraphs are extremely important in search engine optimization.

To prevent your site from being regarded as "over optimization", you should not stuff keywords heavily in your body content. We suggest that you should present the keywords in a natural way. Apart from this, your website copy should have at least 200-250 words.

5. Ensure Clean Coding

To allow search engines to index and analyze your website correctly, you must check correctness of HTML coding manually. Webmasters may build webpages from WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Microsoft Frontpage 2003, but these HTML editors may leave some duplicated or unnecessary tags in your copy especially when you edit the pages very often during web design phase.

In addition, search engines are not good at understanding Java Applet and Flash. If you have Flash or Java applet navigation menu, make sure to duplicate somewhere and include HTML links as well.

Please also check whether your website has broken links. They may stop search engine spiders to crawl other web pages in your website, it may result in loss of hundreds or thousands website traffic per month, and waste your search engine optimization effort.

6. Link Building

In case you have a little bit knowledge about search engine optimization, you likely know that link popularity is very important to attaining high search engine ranking in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc..

Yes, search engines use link analysis to determine search engine rankings. The phiolosophy is that if an inbound link points to your site, your site must have some value. Therefore, the inbound link is regarded as a "positive vote" to your website. The more inbound link you have, the higher is your link popularity. This can boost your search engine ranking.

However, quality of links (link reputation) is also important. If you can get an inbound link from a high popularity website, your site will get more benefit.

There are many methods to perform link building including seeking one-way link, reciprocal links, 3-way links, etc. Because link popularity and link reputation are of great importance to search engine positions, many search engine optimizers spend most of their time in link building.

7. Optimize Dynamic Website Content

Search engines are not good at understanding dynamically generated web pages. Therefore, I suggest you should change your dynamic URL to static URL. If it is not possible, you should consider using some advanced search engine optimization techniques such as Mod-Rewrite to optimize website.

Another simpler way is to create a sitemap and list all dynamic URLs on it. This can help a bit.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is very important to search engine marketing. When it is done properly, it helps you attract many targeted visitors to your website, and can improve your business results.

Written by Jimsun Lui from Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd., a company offers Search engine optimization and search engine positioning service, the company also offers ecommerce solutions

RELATED ARTICLES


Search Engine Spam
Running an online business relies to a greater or lesser extent on search engine traffic. Be this free search engine traffic or pay per click traffic your business still relies on the search engines to profit and survive.
New Site and Sandbox: How to Get Rid of It
You have put lot of sweat in making your site. Now you want it to engender revenues and only source of traffic is search engines. You have completed your seo optimization well but there is no precursor of any traffic. Yes Google places new sites in "Sandbox" and this means that your site would not rank well for high traffic keywords for a certain period. This phenomenon is called as "Sandbox". What if your site is in "Sandbox" or on hold? Should you hang around or is there any way out. Lets look at few of them:
How to Avoid Getting OOPed On by Google?
Earlier this year, I was having trouble getting good search engine placement for one of our sites. I was trading links like crazy, spending many hours a week trying to optimize the site properly, checking my linking structures, keyword density, etc., but still I was not climbing the ranks in Google.
Getting Your Site Seen By Search Engines
Is your website listed on search engines? When people search for you, does your site show up on page 1 or page 20 of the search engine results?
Choosing your Meta-Keywords
This article assumes you already know what a 'meta-tag keyword' is and know a little about their importance to search engines. In this article I will attempt to explain the art of choosing the most appropriate and best performing keywords for your web pages.
Are You A Google Junkie
Google this, Google that, Google Google Google.......
Why Articles Are Not The Route To High Search Engine Rankings
If you have any interest in getting high search engine rankings for your website (and who doesn't) you've probably been sold the idea that writing and publishing your own articles will do it for you.
Finding the Right SEO Company
I often talk to people who have lost faith in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms because of bad experiences. Either they saw no results, felt that they were tricked into subscribing to a service that could not work, or that they wasted money on a firm that did them no good. Although I agree that there are bad SEO firms out there, I know that there are also many good ones. It's your job to make sure you find an SEO firm that will work for you.
How To Indirectly Get To The Top Of Search Engines
There are millions of web sites trying to get listed in the top 20 spots of the major search engines. That amounts to a lot of competition! Even if your website can't get in the Top 20, you can use indirect ways to get it there.
When to NOT Hire a SEO and Why
When you get an e-mail from SEO Company with content similar to this:
The 7 Best Stealth Techniques to Improve Your Google Rankings
Stealth as in Spying. But Knowing What your Top Competitors are Doing and how they are doing it you can greatly improve your very own search Engine Rankings.
Are You Losing The Battle For Search Engine Traffic?
Search engine traffic should be a priority for any online business and some level of optimization is apart of every effective marketing strategy.
Submit Your WebSite: Add Your URL to Web Directories & Search Engines
Why get into Search engines and directories?
Googlebot Wont Go Home
I have 'Googlebot' crawl my site every day like a dispossessed spirit that can't leave.
How to Get Listed in Yahoo Within 48 Hours, Without Paying $299
First of all you need to get a blog. If you don't have one yet, you can get one for free by going to www.blogger.com
All About Links -- Interview With Link Building Expert , Bob Gladstein
Julia: Welcome Bob. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions about link building. I'm going to jump right in ask you why Web sites need links?
Have You Been Dropped By Yahoo?
Yahoo has fairly recently updated its guidelines. You can read the full list at:
Creative Search Engine Optimization ? A Case Study
Search engine optimization this and search engine optimization that. You read and hear about it all day, but what about your site? While there are plenty of articles providing useful information, this article shows you how a real world example met with success. The point of this article is to emphasize creativity when approaching tough optimization situations.
Search Engine Traffic Domination - How to Turn the Search Engines into Your 24/7 Salesmen
Getting your website returned by the search engines as a high result is a significant goal by most webmasters because higher search results means higher traffic and revenues. However, there are some tips you can utilize to help your website gain better rankings by the search engines and ways to turn the search engines into your 24/7 salesmen. The following suggestions, if followed, will help you get better rankings by the search engines and more traffic to your website.
How Real SEO Analysis Works
If you're serious about SEO, you need to know how to analyze the information you uncover.