10 steps to SEO

Posted on Tuesday, 20 October 2009 00:00

Running a successful online business mostly involves getting highly targeted and relevant traffic to your website.
Targeted traffic here means getting those people to your website who would be very interested in purchasing your goods or hiring you for your services. Since millions of searches are conducted on various search engines on a daily basis it is often very difficult to pinpoint the exact phrases that people would use in order to find what you are offering.

You can get targeted traffic from many resources:

Search engines
Online directories
Other websites
E-mails
Links appearing in your advertising
Your URL appearing on your stationery

Here in this tips post I'm going to discuss how you can derive maximum leverage from the search engines to get targeted traffic to your website.

Content is always king. More than 99% of searches on the Internet are conducted for information and that information can exist in the form of text, images or videos. So the search engines index and rank your website according to what you have there. The more content you have the better your chances are of getting ranked higher on the search engine result pages. But that content cannot just be any content; it should be of very high value and highly relevant to your users. General content is not going to get you anywhere on the search engines and neither duplicate content. The content has to be valuable and original.
Use headers to organize your content. Headers make your content scannable and scannable content is preferred both by your human visitors and the search engine crawlers because they can easily make out what you're intending to convey without having to read the entire thing. So make sure that you use your keywords and main expressions in the headers. A header is the highlighted text that appears between <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, <h3></h3>, etc.
Use appropriate formatting and organization. Now and then highlight your main points using because when you highlight your main points it conveys to the search engines that you give extra importance to these points and hence they are important to your overall message. Similarly you should organize your thoughts using bullets -- <li></li> -- because text appearing here too is taken quite seriously by the search engines.
Create compelling page titles. Your page titles lie at the centre of your message; they represent the true meaning of your message. Just as your every page contains unique content, your every page deserves a unique title because a unique title distinguishes one page from another. Further, your page title is used by the search engine result pages to display your link among the search results. This makes it important that you pay extra attention to your page titles because if your page titles are not compelling enough the search engine users are not going to click on your links in the search engine result pages. If possible try to use the exact search phrase the search engine user is using to find you, in your page title. In order to achieve this dedicate a unique page to every search term you want to be found for.
Create search friendly URLs. The search engines don't like dynamically generated URLs, for instance http://www.yourdomain.com/showpage.php?page=14. They prefer URLs that contain your keywords and key expressions, for example, http://www.yourdomain.com/our-web-design-services/. If you are using some content management system for blogging software to maintain your website just make sure that it generates search engine friendly URLs and not URLs that contain parameters.
Have a site map at the top of every page. Just as at the entrance of every city you find a map of the city, at the top of every webpage you should have a site map. Your site map should contain all the important links that your visitors should access. Your site map also makes it easier for the search engine crawlers to crawl all your important web pages.
Have a well-defined navigation system. It is the same as having a site map but your navigation is an integral part of your layout. If possible avoid going for fancy navigation -- all those navigations that are dynamically generated either by JavaScript or by Flash -- and have a simple text-based navigation, and even if you use image buttons make sure that you use the alt attribute of the image tag and put the appropriate text there.
Use your keywords in the hypertext. When you use your keywords in the hypertext it tells the search engines that your keywords are so important that you are linking to another resource to provide more information on those keywords. Some SEO experts suggest that you should use your keywords as hyperlinks for your internal pages and shouldn't use keywords for external pages (in case you are linking to other websites, which you should do amply) because if you use keywords to link to external pages then the benefit goes to those websites and not your website, but I think you shouldn't mind that because you should do for others what you expect others to do for you and this suggestion is elaborated upon in the proceeding point.
Encourage people to link to your website. Inbound links are taken into consideration when the search engines rank your website because when other people link to your website for the merit of your content it validates the value of your content. But how do you make people link to your website? Many people indulge in Link exchange programs but frankly these programs do you little good because the search engine algorithms feel that linking should be voluntary and shouldn't be in exchange to some linking favor. The best form of linking is when people link to you for the value of your content. Now about the thing mentioned in the previous point: when people link to you request them to use the keywords relevant to your website while linking to your website or your web pages.
Maintain a regularly updated blog and build a community around your website. Your blog can be the greatest SEO asset to your website because when you maintain a blog you update its content regularly and search engines love regularly updated content. If you post multiple times every day on your blog you will find that the search engines index your blog on a daily basis; that means when you post on your blog, your entries sometimes appear on the search engine result pages the very next day or sometimes even on the same day. This can really help you if you are launching new products or new services through your blog and you want search engine traffic on a short notice.