Friday, April 4, 2008

How to optimize your website?

Search Engine Optimization has become complex over the years. With more and more webmasters realizing the importance of optimizing, it is becoming more difficult to reach at the top of search engines or maintaining top rankings. Optimizing website for search engine has, certainly, become so intricate, that one often feels lost. Has process of SEO changed? Well, answer is that it had never been 'constant' process. Search engines do evolve over the time and change their algorithms and behavior. Similarly, SEO is reviewed and reformed to match search engines changing methods. Having said all these, there are still steps which are fundamental to website promotion and shall remain relevant even in future, too. Here they are:

A website should have lots of relevant content

The more relevant content you have, the greater is the chance of getting ranked higher. If the quality content related to the subject of your website is present in your website, then the probability of getting linked to by other webmasters also increases considerably. The more they link to you, the greater is the frequency with which the search engines spider your various pages. Lots of content in a website also ensures that more pages of your website gets indexed which in turn helps people find your website through search engines. Also, adding fresh and relevant content to your website not only helps in maintaining top rankings but visitors, too, are tempted to visit the site more often.

The titles and headlines should be compelling

The search engines give importance to text in the title and headlines tags and actually the title of your web page prominently appears as a hyperlink on the search engine result pages. Your page title should truly represent the overall subject or theme of that individual web page. Similarly never use keywords in your title which does not appear in the body copy of the web page.

According to an observation, 8 out of 10 people will read your headlines but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of the copy. Therefore, the search engines, too, pay close attention to what you say within your header tags.

Anchor texts are important

Anchor text (text between and ) tells the search engines as well as the visitors the nature of the web page being linked to. If your keyword appears with the link, it means you have more information/sources about that keyword.

Use proper ALT text with IMG tags

It is a good practice to provide proper ALT text with IMG tags. It informs the visitor about that image as well as search engines give importance to the image and also the web page.

Keep your website as text-friendly as possible

A text friendly website is more website accessible therefore keeping it as text-friendly as possible helps. As discussed, use proper ALT text with IMG tags. Keep the JavaScript and other bells and whistles to the minimum. Test your website with a text-only browser and see that none of your important messages are left out.

The above fundamental steps can take your website a long way in getting higher positions on the search engine result pages. However, remember that these are only basic steps and there are hundreds of things you can do to search engine optimize your website.

If you own a web site and wish to optimize it for Search Engines, contact SEO experts.

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