How to Make an SEO Friendly Website for Beginners
Since the commercialization of the Internet, page one (1) listing has been the prize! If your website is not SEO (search engine optimization) friendly, you can be sabotaging your chance at success! Since most people look no further than page two and most decisions are made on page one, well, if you are not on page one you stand little chance of getting that customer.
Now, some people figure, "I'll get page one anyway! I will use Pay-Per-Click (PPC)!" What if you knew that only five to 10% of surfers click on PPC? If you knew that you were leaving 90% of the business on the table, because according to Google analytics, 90% to 95% of surfers trust organic results only. So, which would you prefer: an organic page-one ranking, or pay-per-click? Fortunately, creating an SEO friendly website can be done by beginners. While there are many areas to consider for page-one dominance, making sure that you do these basic things will get you off to a great start. Now, by no means is this article exhaustive, it is simply a foundation for beginners so that as they move on to the next step, it will save them money, time, headache and heartache! Let's take a look at these steps.
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Things You'll Need
- A website authoring program like MS Frontpage, Adobe GoLive or Dreamweaver, or an HTML editor if you understadn HTML.
Instructions
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1. Proper Page Titles: When you understand that synergy (making sure that everything on your site is saying the same thing) makes you more SEO friendly, you will see the importance of making sure that your title supports your site. For example, some people would put "XYZ Home Page", that says nothing to the bots of relevance. ("Bots" is short for "robots" or crawlers that do the indexing of the Internet for the search engines.) If what you sell are widgets and one of your keywords/phrases is southern-style widgets, then have your title be "XYZ Southern-Style Widget Sales, Repair and Support".
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2. Site Description: Your site description also needs to support the main idea of your site. Again, keeping in mind the keywords/phrases being used, you will want the description to be an enhanced version of your title. For example: "XYZ Southern-Style Widget sales, repair and support. We specialize in high-end manufacturing of American widgets. Private-labeled and custom designed widgets available." Make sure to use ALL your keywords in the description!
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3. Keywords and Phrases: Your title and description should be written AFTER you have chosen your keywords and key phrases. You want to spend most of your time here. You want to choose well-selected words and phrases to ensure that you get good traffic. There are methods and technologies for doing this that would require more than this article; however, ask yourself, "What would most people type is they were searching for my product or service? What would I search for?" Then select the very best ones. It is better to have good optimization for three-to-five than have 50.
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4. Graphic Alt Tags: They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, but not to a BOT! The crawlers cannot see what the picture is; hence when you have a picture, graphic or video on your site, the bot sees a blank space. The way that the bot knows that this picture has relevant value is by using an ALT TAG. An ALT TAG is a description of the graphic. Hint, you will want to use keywords in these descriptions!
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5. Too Much Flash: Flash video has high impact on the viewer, but none on the crawler. Once again, it sees a blank space. Flash is great in limited use. If you have an ALL FLASH site, or a home page that has one big FLASH footprint with very little content, you have an SEO nightmare!
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6. Too Little Content: Finally, content is king! If there isn't sufficient content, then SEO is almost impossible. Why? Well, in the content you are able to build density of keywords and phrases. This density is then measured against the title, description, keywords/phrases and alt tags. It is in this mix that your site is ranked as an SEO friendly site.
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Tips & Warnings
Google only sees three-levels deep, so structure your site for only three levels. If you want help with analyzing your site, you can contact Success by Design for a FREE website/SEO/e-commerce analysis.
Do not make your titles or descriptions too long. For a title, 70-characters is optimal. For a description, 150-characters is optimal. Do not go crazy with keywords and phrases either. Having 50 does nothing if no one is searching for them. Choose three to five good, well selected, keywords/phrases and optimize for that.
Resources
- Photo Credit iStockphoto.com
