Search Engine Optimization: Getting Started
Joe Garite II
Search Engine Optimization: Getting Started By Joe Garite II
Okay, so you've got yourself a nice website and your
advertising campaigns are starting to bring in some customers.
But what if there was a way to advertise without paying for it?
Would you take the time to learn about it? If you answered yes
than keep reading. If you answered no than you can continue to
pay for your advertising campaigns barely making profits and
never increase your revenue.
I am going to explain some of the first steps to get your
website not only optimized for the search engines, but to push
your website up in the rankings war. Grab yourself a cup of
coffee and maybe a muffin and take out your pen and paper, lets
start brainstorming.
First you need to categorize your website. Figure out what
category it is best suited under. For example if I am selling
computer programs that aid web designers, I would categorize my
website under Computer Software. That was easy enough right?
Okay, now comes the difficult part. You need to pick one, just
one, keyword or key phrase that you want to base your homepage
on. Focusing on one keyword/key phrase makes it more valuable in
the page in which it is located. The value of the keyword/key
phrase is known as weight. You want your pages weight to hold 2%
of the keyword/key phrase. This sounds easy, but it's not. Let
me tell you how to do this.
The TITLE tag
First is the most important part, the " " tag. This is
the number one item to use your keyword in. If I were to give my
website selling computer programs that aid web designers, I may
use " Computer Software for Web Design ". Although
it contains a "stop" word (for), the top key phrase I am trying
to work with is before that word.
The META tag
Than there are the META tags. Simply put, these tags go inside
the " " tags in your html. They allow the search
engines to pull up your website using the keywords and describe
your website using the description. Without these tags, you
simply can't have your website pulled up in the search engines.
The ALT tag
Next is the ALT tag which is used in images on your website. If
you wanted to put "Computer Software for Web Designers" at the
top of the page using a font that I know nobody else has, I
would have to use an image. Inside this image I would use an ALT
tag called alt=computer software for web designers". Although
the ALT tag is not as powerful as using the natural text itself
some cases can't be avoided.
The Body
We're almost done. This isn't hard at all right? Okay, so now
that we have our HTML side optimized its time to work on the
side that users see. When doing this, you need to be careful not
to over use the keyword/key phrase but you need to use it enough
to give it the weight it needs to be considered important. This
is the tricky part. One good way to do this is to use it in your
links whenever possible. Search engines like to see those types
of links at the top of the page, so if you can use text links
instead of images this would help your weight increase. Don't
forget to also include them at the bottom of the page. Although
it is less effective, it does help. The other way is to include
the keyword/key phrase into the body. For example in the
sentence "Use it to help you make a better website" I would say
"Use this computer software for web designers to assist you in
making a better website". Make sure you don't go crazy with the
keyword/key phrase, if you use it too much the search engines
may "sandbox" you assuming you are spamming.
This concludes the beginning steps to Search Engine
Optimization. There are many ways to raise your rank in the
search engines. In future articles I will explain how to
advertise for free using your area of expertise. Until next
time...
About the author:
Joe Garite II of WebReality.net has seven
years of experience in the Web Design field. I focus mainly on
the UI of a website, but I have recently started to get into the
SEO field.
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