Basic Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is an art. Optimizing a website or a blog for a search engine is easy enough as long as you are targeting a niche market. What does that mean?

Assume you are trying to sell Computer Services and you are located in Toronto, how would you want to optimize your site?

If you Google "Computer Services", you are going to be up against sites like Dell, Compaq and HP. This is not a good place to start :)

However, if you google "Computer Services, Toronto" you will notice the big boys are no longer on the list, and you will most likely see a lot of your competitors show up on the first page.

This is a niche market. You are going to want to first target people who are specifically looking for computer services in Toronto, and it will be much easier to get a higher ranking when optimizing your site/blog for these keywords.

So once you have determined the keywords you want to optimize your site for, now you have to actually apply a few concepts to get Google, Yahoo and MSN to notice you. Below is a basic list of elements you will need to optimize.

1. Page Title - Make sure you have rich keywords in your title. Don't put your company name here, or at least, use keywords first.
2. Meta Tags - For Blogs, you won't be able to modify your meta tags. If you run a site, you will need to make use of the "description" tag and the "keywords" tag
3. Headings ( H1, H2) - Use your primary keywords in the headings of your site. Try to make your headings match the keywords in the title of your page
4. InBound Links - When people link to your site from theirs, try to have them link using your keywords. Instead of "ABC Computers", have them link "Toronto Computer Services"
5. Content - It is always important to create relevant content with associated keywords. If you run a computer site, but your content has information on Britney Spears and FedEx (hehe), Google will get confused.
6. Alt Tags - Google, at least as of now, cannot read an image unless you give it an Alt Tag. These are important especially to show up on the Google Image search (which brings in more traffic than you would expect)
7. SiteMap - Make sure you have a sitemap on your site, and if possible, submit your sitemap to search engines instead of your home page. A sitemap will allow the Search Engine Crawlers to find all your pages in one shot.
8. Layout - I personally find that having content on the left, and links on the right work better in terms of SEO. The crawlers read your content first, so if your site covers a lot of topics, it will be best to have the crawlers read the content first.

Those are some basic strategies that you will need to implement to get started. Once you have been picked up on the search engines for your niche keywords, then you will get into the more advanced strategies of Search Engine Optimization. We'll save that for another day :)

If you know any strategies that I may have left out (scratch that, definitley left out), please feel free to post a comment :)

Thanks,

Barry