Maximize My Website

Website search engine optimizing (SEO) is a much discussed and debated topic. Search the web for SEO and you will not be lacking in results. Many small business owners do just that, and having read the various articles, blogs, newsletters and knols, optimistically set off to optimize their websites, sure in the knowledge that a few tweaks will see them miraculously float straight to the top of the rankings and earn their first million. I know, I've done it. 

The truth about SEO is that there are no quick fixes, and that it takes a rounded approach of optimising all aspects before real results will occur. We will discuss all of the necessary aspects of website design and marketing which need to be address in the following article. 

Relevant keyword rich content 

Your website must have content which is relevant to the area of the market you are trying to corner. This seems like stating the obvious, until you take a look at how many retail websites out there just have a list of their products with pictures and prices, and no real information. Search engines are evolving all the time to filter their results for the sites which are the most useful for their users, and a mine of information will always rank higher than a list of products. 

It could be assumed that if you own a site on which you sell glass beads, you know something about them. Tell your customers what you know. How are they made? Where are they made? Who uses them and why? Which glass beads are the best and which should be avoided? Try to put some useful information on every page, and link to the most useful pages within your site from other pages where you are struggling to add useful content. This will beef up your site and make it much more attractive to the search engines.

Articles

No matter how literate, well read and articulate you are, sooner or later you are going to run out of things to say. Consider too that the best websites reflect the opinions and points of view of multiple users, and are not just a sounding board for one person. Articles are a great way of adding the viewpoints of other people, not to mention more great keyword rich relevant content. There are many articles websites out there, which contain hundreds of thousands of articles on every subject imaginable, and which you can use free of charge providing you agree not to change them and to link back to the authors site.

The flip side of this is that you too can be an author. If you can write interesting, relevant content on your chosen subject, then there will be no shortage of articles users who will publish your work on their sites, and each publisher generates a keyword rich, targeted link back to your website. Even better, its FREE!

Link optimisation

In the olden days (10 years ago or so), links simply functioned as a means to navigate around websites and the Web. Google changed this when they started to analyse the actual links and figure out what they were about and how useful they were to google users. Now, in order to optimise your website, you need to optimise your links.

If I place a link to my website using the URL, (the web address you see in the browser's address bar), all I am telling Google is to visit my website. However, if I put a link called cheap beads, and link that to my website's URL, I am telling Google to visit my website, which is a site about cheap beads. If I then ensure that when the google spider follows that link, they arrive on a page which mentions cheap beads, I have an optimised inbound link.

The same is true of outward links from your site. When a website manager requests a link to their site from yours, if possible you should include text in that link which contains some of your keywords. This re-enforces to google that your site has relevant content for your users, and makes your site a better choice for Google when displaying search results.

Deep linking

Deep links are links to pages from your wesite, other than your home page. Deep links should be made to the most useful and relevant content on your site, which is more likely to result in Google ranking the quality of that link, and therefore your site, highly. For example:

I am exchanging links with another site about cut gemstones, and want the best quality link possible. I have an article on my website about gemstone healing properties, and so I request that the links manager of the site I am linking to links back to me at that page with the text gemstone beads and their healing properties. This is a deep link.

Organic link exchange

Organic links are the links which build up naturally over time when a website is on the internet. As any website manager can tell you, organic links build up VERY slowly, and are not the easiest way to build your sites popularity. However, there are ways to increase the speed at which you build organic links.

Sites are available that act as a list of websites which are actively looking to exchange links and thus promote themselves. There are also subscription based links managers which automate the process of searching for and adding links to your site. These links are still organic, as you are paying for the use of their software, not for the links, and they take much of the pain out of building organic links. You should remember though, that if you want websites to link to your site, you need interesting and useful content for them to link to.

Paid links

Some sites buy links with targeted keywords in order to build traffic and rankings quickly. This is frowned upon by most search engines, as it is seen as artificially inflating your sites relevance, or "cheating." Be wary of buying links, as if you are caught your site can be blacklisted from Google.

Directories

Directories are websites which contain lists of other websites about a particular subject. They are useful to users as a map of sites, and do have some use to website owners as they do create a targeted inbound link. However, their usefulness is limited, as they rarely have any real content of their own, and as such are unlikely to gain any page rank and thus significance of their own to the search engines.

Website design optimisation

I'm not going to talk much about this, as its usually the first thing that any website owner learns when they first think about marketing their website. What follows is a brief discussion of things which need to be taken into consideration when designing your website. 

Meta tags

Meta tags are the tags which are found in the section of your website, and they describe to the search engines what your website is about. There should be tags for keywords and description, although most search engines pay little attention to these tags now that their algorithms are so able to analyse site content. Still, it takes little time to tweak these tags. 

Image Alt tags

These tags were designed to display a short description of the image on a website while it loads and if it fails to load. As search engine spiders cannot analyse an image, images without their alt tags utilised have no relevance to search engines. Using the Alt tags is an easy way to make your images "visible" to the search engines. 

Page addresses

A page address of http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.php?cPath=45 has less relevance to a search engine than a web address of http://www.yourwebsite.com/website-optimisation even though they go to the same place. This is because search engine users are not going to search for index.php?cPath=45, but they will search for website optimisation. If you can, make sure your page addresses are relevant and useful.

If you are reading this text, you have managed to plough through the reams of useful information about website optimisation, and you have reached the end of this article. I hope you find this useful in promoting your website, (unless you are one of my competitors!), and do feel free to express your interest and gratitude by linking to my website by following this link:

http://www.magpiejewellery.net/resources/add_link.php