How to Search Engine Optimize your Website SEO

OK Here we go! SEO stands for: Search Engine Optimization, There are a million companies out there that offer Search Engine Optimization services for your website, here is how to do it your self.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Website
• Internet Account
• Computer
• Some HTML Knowledge

1. 

   I'm going to explain to you what BOTs are, basically the term BOT comes from the word Robot, this BOTs crawl the internet saving links and jumping from one website to another creating searchable Databases such as Google or Yahoo.

2. 

   You need to make sure your website is well optimized so the BOT can navigate it seamlessly. This means you don't want to have broken links. If you do the BOT will hit a wall and most likely leave your site. Once you make sure yo do not have broken links you want to create a Site Map. A site map will help the BOT index titles and understand your website faster. The file Robots.txt its used to tell this BOTs where to go and where not to go. If you have a folder with files you don't want to be included simply add a line like this: "Disallow: /FolderName/" to your robots.txt file so the robot doesn't waste its time trying to browse through these files.

3. 

   Name your web pages accordingly, Robots are smarter nowadays and if your site offers, lets say for example, Auto Parts, you want to include keywords within your page's names: About_Our_Auto_Parts.htm instead of About.htm. Include Meta information for Keywords and Description as well as a well written title for each page.

4. 

   Make sure you name your images accordingly as well. If the image is about a car tire for example, don't name it 099324.gif, name it Car_Tire.gif this will help BOTs recognize the images as well, always always add ALT tags to your images (...gif alt="Car Tire") this helps people with vision impairment to hear the description of the image plus it helps the BOTs recognize and index the image as well.

5. 

   Once you know your site doesn't have broken links, has a site map, has well written titles and descriptions, and you named your images and files according to the content of your site, and you have made sure all of your images have an alternate text tag (ALT) you need to get INBOUND LINKS. This is by far the must important step to get ranked and included in the top search results. You need to get quality links pointing to your site.

6. 

   You want to get links from sites with information relevant to your content. You don't want a site that offers computer parts linking to your Auto Parts website, you want Car Dealerships, Car Repair Centers, Car Enthusiast websites, etc. link to your site. This is the hard part, of course your competitor won't link to your site nor should you link to them. You can create a "Link Exchange" campaign where you offer relevant websites trade links with you, but remember you need quality inbound links, about links go to the next step.

7. 

   Linking, as I said, is by far the best way to get BOTs to come to your site and index its content, but pay attention to this step as is the must important fact about links. If you are aiming for certain keyword, lets say, Auto Parts; you want the inbound link to include that phrase in the linked text, the more text links that include that specific term the more chances you get to be in the top results, If you get 100 websites to link to your site with the keyword within the link you must likely earn a top spot on the natural results.

8. 

   Now you know the basic steps to achieve search engine positioning and how to target your specific keywords, you want to manually add your site to every search engine out there. Look for "Submit my Site" on every search engine you run across. Don't pay hundreds of dollars for somebody else to do this,. If you have the time do it yourself is very challenging and rewarding once you start seeing results.

9. I don't want to miss Domain names. If you sell Auto Parts and you want your site to be found, make sure the Keyword Auto Parts is within the domain name, something like AutoPartsHollywood dot com. Use common sense for this step. Remember, the more content you have on your site the more content BOTs have to index for your site.

10. 

    Get a Google account and add their "Webmaster's Tools" to your site so you can see what Google's BOT sees, this way you can improve the keywords within your content and see what search terms people are using to find you. Good Luck!

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure your content is well written.
• Make sure to close all your HTML tags.
• Make sure you add ALT tags to ALL your images.
• Add a site map.
• Get inbound links.
• Add Meta Keywords and Meta description for each page.
• Name your Images and Documents according to the content of your site.
• Get listed on DMOZ.com
• Don't over use keywords within your content.
• Don't try to hide content within your code, BOTs will figure it out and won't come again.
• Don't write content Just-for-the-bot like white text over a white background that humans can't read the Bot will figure it out and won't come back.
• Remember the links that are actually worth having come from relevant websites.

Resources

• Google Optimization Guidelines for Webmaster
• Using Sitemaps
• About Robots.txt
• Google Webmaster Tools

[WordWhizKid]

on 1/15/2009 Great tools to boost your Web site's reach, thank you! I learned a lot!! 5*s!

[NightowlMama]

on 1/14/2009 great article thanks a bunch