How to Enhance Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Your Web Site

For a website to receive visitors, people must be able to find it in search engines. When a search engine "crawls" a website to add content to its index, it scans all of the text in the website's content and HTML code to determine what the website is about. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves creating your website to contain the text and images that people are most likely to search for about a given topic. Some forms of SEO also involve external website characteristics.

Instructions

1. Write your website's content with keyword phrases. The words that a person would type in a search engine to find content about your topic should be among the most common words appearing in the article. After you finish writing, paste the text of the article into a text analysis tool to see the most common keywords.

2. Create article title that contains relevant keywords. The most important keyword phrase for an article should be present both in the URL of an article and in its HTML title tag. This will help the article's search engine placement for that keyword phrase.

3. Add meta description and keyword tags to your articles. The description tag should contain an overview of an article's content, and should contain less than 200 characters. Google only displays the first 156 characters of a page's description in search engine results. The keyword tag should contain a list of keywords and keyword phrases relevant to the article.

4. Add title and alt attributes when adding images to your website. A search engine robot only reads text, and cannot determine what an image is unless you add this information to the image's tag. Properly tagging an image may bring additional traffic from image-based search engines, such as Google Images.

5. Obtain links from other websites. Although some websites may be willing to link to yours simply by asking, you usually have to write content that other website owners find valuable. Google's "PageRank" algorithm determines the authority of a website by the number of other sites that link to it. If numerous websites link to yours, Google will determine that your website is an authoritative page and will raise its position on search result pages.

6. Engage in social bookmarking. Allow visitors to recommend your website on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg. A recommendation from a reader may bring visitors to your website from her social circle. Search engines may use recommendations in determining your website's position on result pages. For example, Bing places websites higher on result pages when they have been recommended by the searcher's Facebook friends.

References

• SelfPromotion; "Search Engine Optimization: Preparing Your Pages for the Search Engines"; Robert Woodhead
• The Affluent Blogger; "Online Writing Guide: The Process of Creating Website Content"; Aiden Clinton; May 2011
• SageRock Digital Marketing Blog; "Title Tag and Meta Description Length for Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask"; August 2009
• PCWorld; "Bing, Facebook Deepen Ties, Threaten Google +1"; Brennon Slattery; May 2011