November 9, 2007 13:21
Category: Optimizing
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It's nearly 4 in the morning, the daybreak is not far off, but there is no sleep in your eyes. Tonight is no different than the other nights when you keep checking the logs for umpteen times to see if there is any visitor to your website.
There aren't many, and you start feeling that possibly your website will never have good number of visitors.
You may wonder why the visitors are keeping away from your site. The truth however is that they may not know your site exists in the first place.
The path between making your site known and visible is what is commonly called search engine optimization - SEO in short. And the good news is the best SEO steps are rather easy to implement. But first, what is it that SEO does.
Search engine optimization refers to those actions you take that makes it easy for search engines to understand what your site stands for, and what are those search terms commonly used by a user that apply to your website.
Apparently therefore the puzzle to solve is how to incorporate certain steps in your website that will make it visible in search engine results because that is where the largest flow of traffic is generated. These steps are what constitute the best SEO techniques.
There are quite a few ones, but let us look at the most basic ones.
Knowing Your Keywords
The bedrock of best SEO is knowing what are those combination of words, referred to as the keywords or key-phrases, that aptly describe your website. There is a catch here. Let's study an example.
Suppose your site is about rock climbing, and you want to tell the world about the various techniques of it as well as the different tools that are used for the purpose. Suppose further you decide that 'rock climbing tools' and 'rock climbing techniques' will be the 2 main key-phrases to emphasize in your website.
You may be surprised that none of these 2 phrases are actually searched for by users. Instead may be 'rock climbing adventure' is a more frequently used key-phrase. And so this is the term you must use in your website to attract search traffic.
How would you know which key-phrases you need to use? For that you have to use keyword search tools to ferret out those terms that users frequently search for and those that apply to your site the best. SEO begins from here.
Google search results for 'rock climbing'.
Relevant image like this is one of the best search engine optimization (SEO) steps to achieve top rank.Structuring Your Site
The next best SEO step will be structure your website in the shape of a pyramid, the apex of which is the home page. Below it will be the tier-2 pages that have direct relation with respect to the home page.
For example, if rock climbing is the main subject of your site, the tier-2 pages can be about 'rock climbing adventure', 'how to climb rock', 'rock climbing kits', and 'famous rock climbing sites'.
Note I've mentioned the tier-2 page topics within inverted commas. This is intentional in order to drive the point home that each tier-2 page must treat each topic as its key-phrase.
Remember these phrases are those you've found out earlier when you used the keyword search tools as explained above.
Now come the tier-3 pages. Each tier-2 topic can have any number of tier-3 pages. Here you need to ensure 2 best SEO actions:
- Every group of tire-3 pages must suitably conform to the respective tier-2 topic.
- Each tier-3 page will once again be based on one or 2 properly researched key-phrases.
- All the pages of the website will prominently display the main navigating links that lead to the homepage and the tier-2 topic pages.
Meta Tags & Heading
For each page including the homepage include 3 meta tags, namely the keyword (many say it's no longer required, but no harm if you have), the title, and the description tags.
Ensure that you have no more than 3 key-phrases in the meta keyword tag of each page which the first one ought to be the main key-phrase of that page. Similarly, the description and the title tags should preferably start with the main key-phrase, but surely not beyond the third word.
The heading (H1) of each page will again have the main key-phrase and both the description and the title tags as well as the heading need to be attractive, enticing, appealing, and compelling.
These rank as some of the best SEO steps - especially the title tag - because usually this is what is displayed in the search results.
Other Best SEO Techniques
- Don't let any of your page go without content. Often in case of ecommerce sites the tier-3 pages are product pages that have no content except for names of the products and their brief descriptions like size, color, etc. A good idea may be to include some broad contents in the tier-3 pages even if it is only describing the page products in more details.
- Spread the key-phrase all over the page content, in the beginning, at the end, and in between, but do not go overboard. Too much usage of key-phrase is liable to be considered as a forced technique to influence search results, and is not liked by the engines.
- Mention the key-phrase in the 'alt' description of at least one but no more than 2 images in each page. Try also to include images that have some semblance with the topic of the respective pages.
- Perhaps the most important best SEO step - though external or off-page to your site - is to obtain 'respectable' incoming links pointing to your website. However, it cannot be denied that earning good incoming links is quite a difficult task. No one links you for free unless it serves his/her interest.
In my opinion, the 2 comparatively easy ways to get incoming links are listing your site in relevant categories in directories, and issuing press releases now and then.
Conclusion
It is not possible to cover all the best SEO steps in a single article such as this one. However, if you're able to consistently follow the above ones, you will stand a good chance to attract sizeable traffic from search engines.
And then may be you'll no longer need to live sleepless nights bothering about lack of traffic. In fact it may very well be the other type of sleepless nights - how to cater to so much traffic.
Here's wishing you best of luck with your very best SEO efforts.
