Your new website looks spectacular. It has captured the very essence of your soul. Things are really starting to come together for your new business and you understand the importance of having a website. There's only one problem. Customers can not find your fresh new website. All that beauty and expensive web design looks to have gone to waste. So what should you do? How do you optimize a website for search engines?
Understanding Search Engine Optimization is the first step towards gaining visibility on the internet. Search engines are nothing more than robots. In order to properly optimize your website for search engines, you must first learn to think like a robot.
Robots can not see images or many more things that might make your website so beautiful. Instead they see code. They read tags. They look for keywords that tell them what your page is about. Using the following tips should help your website gain recognition with search engines and help increase traffic to your web pages.
- Use keywords. Certain words or phrases that are of importance to your website should be used and highlighted in some way. Choose these words wisely and do not over use this technique. You should first begin by researching what customers in your line of work are searching for. Google has a very handy keyword tool that can be used for this purpose. If you are not already using those words or phrases within your text, you should rewrite your text to accommodate those words. Although it is important for the search bots to see these words, it is also important not to over use the words. There is a fine line between search engine optimization and spam. Repeated and unnecessary use of a keyword can hurt your rankings as much as help them.
- Use bold and italics. After your text has been written and your keywords have been incorporated, you should highlight each keyword at least once on your page. You can do this by using bold or italics. This helps tell the search bots that these words are of extreme importance.
- Use title and image tags. Using a title tag is probably the most important thing that you can do as far as search engine optimization is concerned. It is the main tag that tells search engines what your page is all about. It is also what visitors will see when your website finally makes it into search results. So be careful to balance your optimization with user friendship. Although it must be optimized, it also needs to be clickable and appealing for human users too. Search bots can not see images. The only way to tell search engines what your image is about is to use alt tags that are attached to an image. This is an excellent opportunity to use keywords that would otherwise cramp your text. This also helps you to appear in image results as well.
- Use link building. I can not stress the importance of this enough. It is also a very time consuming aspect of search engine optimization. In order for your website to have any weight or importance to search engines like Google, it must have links that point to it. Links from relevant sites are the strong, while one way links are the strongest. Many people achieve this by offering link exchanges with relevant sites. However, natural and organic links to your website through other relevant websites and social media networks is showing more importance these days. These links are one way and often text based. Text links are what you should be focused on. Text links are not only a link to your site, but they are also a link that actually tells the search bot something about it's next stop.
- Avoid flash and intro pages. Although flash can be quite appealing to the eye, it is almost invisible to search bots and tells search engines absolutely nothing about your web page. Using a little flash can be acceptable, but when a search bot follows a link to your website, it needs to find something that tells it what your website is all about.
There are many more techniques used to achieve rankings with search engines and this article has just scratched the surface. Although it may not include every option it is a good start towards gaining visibility and having a well optimized website. Be sure not to abuse any of the above tips. The last thing you need is for a heavy hitting search engine like Google to peg you for spam. Good luck with your new website and happy hacking!
