Building an Effective SEO Strategy
Many businesses big and small realize in order to survive in today’s harsh economy; they should have their own website. But for some reason they fail to recognize that in order for the website to be successful that they also have to then promote it through SEO.
At the most basic level, SEO means finding ways to increase your websites rankings in the search result pages (SERPS), if you’re successful you generally will increase traffic to your website.
Advanced search engine optimization can often entail complex site redesign because the developer used “spider traps” that are blocking the search engines from indexing your site. But typically there are a few simple steps that you can implement right now to increase your search engine rankings. All it requires is a little effort and re-examining of how you approach the content on your site.
You should be conscious of placing the appropriate keywords for your business through every aspect of your website. This included you page titles, headlines, site architecture (URLs) and the naming of your images.
Think of your keywords as search terms, what someone would type into Google if someone was looking for information about your products and/or services.
Your title tag and your page header are the two most important areas to put your keywords, but beware, keyword stuffing could get you banned as a spammer!
The most basic strategy for search engine optimization is the internal link structure of your own website and is an easy and affordable way to increase traffic to specific pages on your website.
When building internal links is to be sure to make your anchor tags search engine friendly. The more relevant the keywords you select pointing to a particular page the more likely that page will appear in the SERPS when someone searches using those same terms.
As with all SEO approaches you want to make sure that your links are appropriate and that that you’re also linking to internal pages of your website to avoid over optimization of your home page.
Adding a XML and HTML sitemap is critical to the success of your website, this acts as a roadmap to your website allowing the spiders to navigate.
When adding new pages to your website name them using keywords, as an example if I had a webpage that sold blue widgets I would want to name that page blue-widgets.html (or appropriate page extension).
Flash looks pretty but it can be one of the biggest obstacles for effective SEO. Flash, AJAX, Java all increase your code to content ratio and the robots can have a difficult time deciphering the coding.
If you absolutely have to have that fancy flash navigation menu or that flash image, consider placing text navigation links in the footer of your webpage(s).
Make sure that you use the “alt” tag including a keyword caption to all your images. Again be mindful so you don’t keyword stuff these images so you don’t get labeled as a spammer and also be considerate to our site impaired visitors who would be using a text reader to read the content on your site.
The content on your website needs to be fresh and updated regularly not only so the search engines come back, but also for your visitors who would want to read fresh new articles.
A blog area for the CEO is just not an element of social media but also an important SEO strategy as you spread your message across the vast social networking platforms.
A real easy way to add traffic and new incoming links to your website is by using the relationships you already have and establishing new ones. You should personally pick up the telephone can call the people that you know in your niche and discuss back linking to each other’s websites. One note of caution in this area however, please make certain that your link partners website is not “spammy” to avoid linking to a bad neighborhood.
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6 Responses to Building an Effective SEO Strategy
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To attract an initial traffic flow that will hopefully convert into regular readers and subscribers, new bloggers who have good writing skills need to focus on:
1. Learning and understanding SEO (search engine optimization) and optimizing blog post titles, sub-titles, and keywords.
2. Mastering use of the blogging platform that matches their goals and is easy to use.
3. Choosing a niche and staying with it.
Interesting content is an attractor and in blogging content is king but promotion is queen. There are 10 standard tips to get traffic:
(1) You need to have expertise in a niche.
(2) You need to know how to write very well.
(3) You need to verify your blog with search engines and structure a reader friendly and search engine friendly blog by learning how to apply basic SEO techniques.
(4) You need to build an archive of high quality original content and keep adding to it.
(5) You need to update your content frequently with new posts in order to hold reader interest.
(6) You need to learn how to promote your content effectively through social media, social networks and RSS feed sites, thereby encouraging other bloggers to backlink to your posts.
(7) You need to comment, comment, comment on other blogs in the same niche and backlinks to related posts in posts of your own.
(8) You need to form relationships with other bloggers and create a blog centered community around your own blog.
(9) You need to encourage your readers to comment on your posts and respond to their comments ASAP after approving them.
(10) You need to participate in blog carnivals in your niche and become a guest blogger on blogs with a higher PageRank then your own blog has.
Thanks for good stuff
I cannot thank you enough for the blog article. Thanks Again. Will read on…
Question:
Is there a way to see how the pages that have been indexed are ranked without having to type it in at Google and then start searching ?
Thanks for asking, what I use is Master Website Manager, here is my review: http://www.seotrainingsw.com/2010/04/master-website-manager-review/
Thanks for the great information Roy.