Know-How Exchange : Other

bratha:

There are probably hundreds of useful articles on the Web with the same title as your question. Most of these articles will say some combination of the following:

1. Hire a search engine optimization consultant
2. Update your site frequently
3. Submit your site to search engines (including new pages)
4. Make sure your site has proper TITLE tags
5. Incorporate your keywords consistently on each page of your site
6. Etc.

Tell us your URL and we can give you some better advice. Otherwise, check out the knowledge in this site:

https://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=search+engine+optimization&sp-a=sp100...

I went to a seminar which talked about the type of algorithm Google uses (the exact algorithm is a secret, and is constantly being adjusted by Google).

Some items that are weighted highly:
- having other sites which are ranked highly for those keywords link to you
- having the keyword in your URL (www.keyword.com)
- having the keyword in the directory name (the stuff that comes after your URL - www.url.com/keyword.html

Areas that do count, but not as much:
- the text of your web page
- having keywords in your META NAME="KEYWORDS" and META NAME="DESCRIPTION" tags
- the ALT text for graphics

Areas to watch out for - the Google bot that goes out and catalogs web pages often has trouble with pages with lots of graphics (and little text), extensive frames, or extensive use of when the content is made on the fly (I forgot the term for this).

I did some keyword optimization for a startup I work with, and was able to move them up to be top listing for some of the improtant keywords (and higher for others). Their site needed a few changes:

- they used mostly graphics for their page, and no ALT description for the pics. I added ALT descriptions. I also took out some graphics and added in text. Added benefit is that the description that was displayed on Google before did not say what the company did (it used the first text found, which was the Copyright statement). Adding more text allowed us to get an actual description to show up.

- we made a strong effort to get listed in directories of the associations related to our industry. This gets you inbound links.

- went through and modified the content with thoughts related to optimizing for search engines.

Peter

As Bratha noted there are many articles on SEM – here are ten steps I wrote to help you get started --

1. Review your company's web site to discover how "search-friendly" the web site and its architecture are for search engines. "Search engine-friendly" means how easy it is to access web pages and information on your site. This step involves graphically depicting a complete sitemap, or schematic, of your site. Seeing the complete picture in the form of a sitemap provides the perspective necessary to tackle development of SEO planning.
2. Conduct preliminary visibility research of your site on Google and the other major search engines. In search, Google is king, but it's not the only game in town. Customers have different search engine preferences, e.g. Yahoo, AltaVista, MSN, AOL, etc., for different kinds of searches. You need to be easily found with all of them.
3. Conduct visibility research of your site on industry-specific sites such as those operated by trade associations and trade magazines. Many business people will look to their own industry sites to identify resources with higher credibility than those found in general search.
4. Conduct a keyword usage study of your site by reviewing keywords/key phrases used in search engines. WordTracker.com offers keyword research tools displaying relevant words as well as their frequency of the usage on search. It has become the industry standard for keyword research. Reviewing your web site statistics software will also help you to find out and determine what keywords/key phrases your web visitors are using to find you.
5. Review copywriting to make sure it is well integrated and matches with keywords/key phrases to describe and sell products or services. Make sure copy for each page reflects the "theme" for that page. This means repeating "theme" keywords/key phrases on that page several times without appearing repetitious to the reader, as well as accurately describing the content of that page.
6. Review HTML tags to ensure your site is optimizing them. Each page on your site should have its own short descriptive title tag and all tags should be unique to their page content.
7. Review link exchange and partnership programs. Increasing the number of quality links that point to your site will give you higher PageRanks. Having higher PageRanks will help increase your positions on search results pages. This is because some search engines pay particular attention to and assign greater weight to quality links.
8. List all target sites and document all site registrations with search engines and industry sites. This will make it easier to determine which site registrations may be missing.
9. Explore the best opportunities for paid-for-performance search engine listings. Free listings are only as good as a web site's relevancy and ranked positions from a search, obtained through natural/organic search engine optimization. Often paid listings will deliver higher relevance and better ranking positions. Paid listings can be the best bang for your marketing dollar.
10. Review your site's traffic monitoring capabilities. How are you monitoring your website traffic and what information are you gathering? Information from web site visitor statistics will provide you important information about your web site visitors, such as what keywords/key phrases they are using to find you. It often identifies trends for prospective and current customers' behaviors and activities. It will report which pages were looked at, for how long and if the visitor entered any data. Also, it will be very helpful to track and review the performance of your SEO effort. Measurement of results is what today's marketing is all about.

Hope this helps, good luck.