Search Engine Optimization

By Robert Blizzard

Your domain name: there is a reason speculators have bought up hundreds of thousands of .com names. Because the words that appear in your domain name are a head start in getting your website found by a search engine.

Tips:

• Incorporate your keywords
• Keep it as short as you can
• Make it memorable

Use every opportunity

At this point, search engines still can’t analyze images. This means that it is the words on your website that matter. Be sure to take every opportunity, whether it is in the name of your images, the meta tags for your html documents, or descriptions of your links, to reinforce your keywords.

Not everything is equal

Search engines will give more weight to some words than others. The title of your web pages, for example, is one of the most important as the engine will assume it is the best description of your site. The same applies to the header tags, or items appearing higher up on you page.

Tip:
Use CSS based layout so that the content is loaded before your navigation system. The style sheet will ensure that each appear where they should, but in the HTML document, the content comes first. You don’t want the first thing a search engine sees to be “Home”, “About Us”, and so on.

Outside your site

The biggest difference in your search engine results will come not from what’s on your site, but what’s on other people’s sites. Most search engines, and Google especially, care most about how many backlinks there are to your site, and the quality of them.

A backlink is a link to your website from someone else’s. High profile websites (universities, news organizations, etc.) are deemed more important than others (such as your MySpace page). To create backlinks, submit your site to web directories, offer to provide a link on your site, and write blogs or articles for other websites.

Search engine optimization is the easy part, just make sure you’re taking advantage of your opportunities. The work intensive part is to create a network of links that lead internet users to you. That takes time and effort.