Top 5 Search Engine Optimization strategies

Websites are not just about design anymore. Websites had become our tools of trade, our frontiers of information, our advisors and messengers, our libraries and news sources. Your competitors are out there, providing information, servicing clients, supporting their staff by utilizing the power of web sites. Are you left behind? Some of the best things your website can do for you are becoming an invaluable tool to your business, giving your credibility, providing visitors with information while “spreading the word" via search engines.

Nowadays just taking care of title, description and keyword tags within the source of your pages is no longer enough. If you need great results, you need to address the website as a whole. For that task you may want to consider hiring a well-established Search Engine Optimization company (a SEO). In a meanwhile, if you are on a budget and not affraid of a little elbow grease, there are some strategies you can start implementing today to improve your web site ranking in light of Search Engine Optimization:

- Establish Well-developed Home Page
- Minimize the use of images, and Optimize the ones you have got.
- Provide volumes of quality of Information
- Use proper linking
- Keep Content Fresh and Relevant

Here is some more detailed information about each strategy:

1. ESTABLISH WELL-DEVELOPED HOME PAGE
Do Your Homework. The home page content on your site should use more content than a traditional printed promo material, such as a brochure. Make home page a home – people want to bookmark it only when there is enough of sufficient, fresh and regularly updated information. Avoid just using information such as a mission statement on your homepage. Give visitors (read - search engines) enough reasons to come back: post news, links to useful articles, event details, daily quotes, new products and services – things that are relevant to your business. How much is enough? There is no definite standard, but you should aim for at least 600-800 words on average for a home page.

2. MINIMIZE THE USE OF IMAGES, AND OPTIMIZE THE ONES YOU HAVE GOT.
Take care of Images. Skip the images when you can. Image type of navigation should, if possible, be replaced by a text type of navigation. Thanks to CSS style sheets, there are lots of ways to add special effects to your navigation without use of bulky images.

Do not forget to optimize the images you cannot avoid using – such as logos promotional materials, product images, etc. There is a wonderful feature recognized by all browsers – alternative description. It allows for your images to become a searchable part of the website, so, for example, instead of “x0115.gif” search engines will read “how to grow green curlies”. This may bring your page up within search results when “green curlies” or “grow curlies” area a part of the search query. Every time you do not use alternative description for an image, it is a keyword opportunity lost.

3. PROVIDE VOLUMES OF QUALITY INFORMATION
Make it Plenty and Useful. When people look up websites, they expect information – more information then would be typically found in the brochure. Those times when you could intrigue visitors by giving them “teasers” of information and expect them to contact you for more, are long gone. Remember – if you will not be giving your visitors enough information, someone else will. You don’t have to give out your company secrets to post sufficient amount of relevant content on the site. Your visitors should know that they can depend on you for critical information.

In addition to your credibility as an expert on a subject, useful content is an important tool when it comes to search engines. If your visitors found information you provide helpful, they will come back for more, and refer others to your website as well, improving your web site statistics – some search engines crawl regularly updated sites more often, indexing them and ranking them accordingly.

4. USE PROPER LINKING STRATEGY
Link are your friends, use them with care. Your content and navigation menu should have plenty of internal links: search engines love links. When a search engine hits your index (home) page, it crawls through the page and hits every link on that page it finds, and goes through your site in progression. Search engines judge the relevancy of your site by match of words in a search query to the content, description, title and other attributes of your site. They also consider the text that is used for links. If all 50 of your links indicate “click here” rather then having individual subject of a link spelled out, such as “blue widgets success”, “about blue widgets”, “blue increases revenue for widget users” etc. – then your site’s success would like somewhere in the search reference to “clicks” and “here” rather then “widgets”. You get the idea.

Also please keep in mind that search engines prefer sites that have ratio of internal links (within your site) higher then external links (web sites other then yours).

5. KEEP WEBSITE CONTENT FRESH AND RELEVANT
Keep it Real. Keep researching keywords for your business and using them throughout your website. Besides of simply looking keywords up, search engines search text for keyword occurrences. If your business is to sell mechanical flow control devices, it cannot expect your site be brought up with the results for “Pulitzer Prize”. Remember - your content should be relevant to your business. Keep in mind that while content within your site should contain plenty of relevant keywords within the text and links, artificial keyword flooding is not a welcomed practice.


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Remember, search engines evolve every day, you have to stay informed about new developments and strategies. Research and implement new techniquess as often as you can. If the job becomes to big for you, you can always turn to your trusted SEO and web development company.

Dina Dadian is a VP of Web Operations for powersolution.com - Computer Network Support and Web Development Company based in New Jersey