The term “SEO” stands for search engine optimization. SEO refers to the process of getting your site primed and ready for the search engines. There are things you do to your own site and things you do on other sites that will effect your SEO. In this post we will go over a few of the different factors.

First we will go over the different things that you can do to your own site which will effect your search engine placement. Everything I’m about to say are basically educated guesses because with the exception of Google engineers, nobody knows exactly what works and what doesn’t.

The main parts of on site SEO are: META tags, page titles, and text

Page Titles

The most important part of on page SEO is the page title. If you want to rank for “keyword 1″ in Google then your page title should ideally be “Keyword 1″. Sometimes a client will want to have their company name in the title as well as the main keyword so it may look something like “Company Name | Keyword 1″ which isn’t quite as good as the first variation but it’s still pretty good. I’m sure we have all seen page titles like this:

Company Name | keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword4 keyword5 keyword6 keyword7 keyword8 keyword9

One may think this is a superior page title because it contains so many of the desired keywords right in the page’s title. Unfortunately the more keywords the title contains to more watered down and less important each keyword is. You want to keep all your page titles short and sweet and make sure each page title accurately describes the page that it represents.

META Tags

Today META tags aren’t nearly as important as they were back in the day. Years ago the search engines would pretty much take META tags at face value and rank you according to what you had in your META tags. Of course you can probably guess how that worked out in the end so today there is much less importance placed on the METAs.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore the METAs, you should always write unique keywords and descriptions for each page if possible.

Text & Content

You must have unique content if you plan on ranking for any terms which are worthwhile. The text should ideally contain the keyword or phrase that you want to rank for at least once or twice. For example if you want to rank for “naples web design” then you would try to get that phrase into the body of the text once or twice, put it in the page title, and even make sure you get it in the META tags too.

You can never have enough unique content, ever. Think of it as fishing and you’re fishing for leads, sales, or new clients. Each article or post on your site acts as the fishing pole, the more content you have on your site the more poles you have in the water. We all know that the guy with 20 poles in the water is probably going to catch a lot more fish than the guy with one pole.

That pretty much sums up the major parts of on page SEO. The factors above are certainly not the only parts of on site SEO but they are the main ones.

The main parts of off site SEO are: external links, the authority of the external links, and the anchor text

External Links

The art of getting other websites to link to you, without a doubt the most important part of off-site or external SEO.  You can do this by tricking webmasters using link bait, creating blogs or profiles on their sites and doing it yourself, blogging on 4rd party sites, exploiting security holes in the script the host is running on, and various other ways.

Authority

There is a lot of debate on how important this is. There is no question that a link from a site like microsoft.com is far better than a link from napleswebdesign.net. What is open for debate surrounds how much effect low authority sites have on ranking. Many people say that it depends on the site being linked to. For example, if you took microsoft.com and pointed 500 low quality links at it you would probably rank for the keyword you were going after because of the trust and authority microsoft.com already has, so Google is going to take that into account. Now if you were to go to GoDaddy and register a brand new domain and then point 500 low quality links at it, it will probably raise some red flags with Google because you have an untrusted site getting lots of backlinks from other untrusted sites.

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the text that the actual link is made up of. Here is an example of Anchor Text. When you get links to your site you should definitely try and get your keywords in the anchor text but don’t always use the same anchor text, mix it up some. When I get links to this site I may get 20 links with the anchor text of “naples web design” then 20 that say “naples website design” and so on. The words you use in your anchor text directly effect how Google ranks you so you should be sure to choose your anchors wisely.

If you don’t have enough time or patience to do your own search engine marketing I encourage you to contact us and see how we can help you.

Naples Search Engine Optimization is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

There are two type of Search Engine Optimization. On page and off page. Off page optimization is anything done separate from the site, i.e. article pr, social networking, linking and directory submissions. On page is where you refine your website to make the most of the advantages SEO can offer.

Title optimization is the most important element of on page optimization. It should be short but descriptive. It needs to tell visitors enough about your site as it is the first thing that is shown in the search engines. It should include your or your business name and few targeted keywords.

Next is meta tag optimization. Although these are nowhere near as important as they used to be, they take such little effort to do, it’s worth the effort. The meta description should contain your USP straight away. The USP is your Unique Selling Point. What makes you or your business different from the others. What kind of speciality do you offer and market yourself as offering. Whatever it is, include it here with a clever scattering of keywords. Depending on the type of business you are running, there is a school of thought that says it is useful to add your phone number in the description. The belief is that visitors who see a phone number in the SERP are more confident in the legitimacy of the site and the business itself.

HTML tags are another page element that need a little SEO attention. Your headers are considered important by Google at least. H1 tags should be used to define the site’s title or heading. H2 and H3 are used for sub titles, headings, post titles and other important sections of the site. Separating page content with headers enhances human readability as well as search engine.

Keyword optimization is the most used phrase of any SEO conversation. This takes some thought and planning before implementing to get the most out of it. The idea is to create website content that is readable and relevant while being populated with your target keywords. There are plenty of tools on the internet that can help you with keyword selection, but only good judgement or a good copywriter can weave them into your website copy so they don’t stand out.

It is important to not overdo the keywords. Even if you can create good quality content to hide them in, the search engines are believed to penalize website they think are ‘keyword stuffing’, i.e. just adding keywords to spoof the search engine.

Alt text is another important facet of any website. The search engine spiders can only read text. They simply don’t see images or video. So even if your site is content rich and is always updated, if you don’t add text to your media it won’t do you any good. Alt text is a method of describing the media on your web page. This does two things, one it tells any visitors that something relevant is missing of something happens to the media and two, the spiders can read it.

This is by no means an exhaustive analysis of on page optimization, there simply isn’t enough room to go through it all. It should be enough to give you a basic idea of how it all works, and encourage you to read further.

On Page SEO Optimization is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design