Free! - Optimizing your Web Site for Search Engines

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

How can your website rank better than your competitors so it will be noticed by its target audience? This is where SEO comes in.  Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.

Keywords

Keywords are another important aspect of SEO. Take a look at this list (ordered by priority) and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Did I put my keywords in <title> tag? It's important to place keywords in the title tag as they are displayed in the search engines as your page title. The title tag must be short (less then 8 words) and it is important to place the keywords in the beginning of your tag.

2. Did I use Keywords in my URLs? Keywords in URLs help a lot - e.g. – "http://yoursite.com/DMXzone-seo.html", where "DMXzone-seo" is the keyword phrase you attempt to rank well for. But if you don't have the keywords in other parts of the document, don't rely on having them in the URL.

3. Have I placed the right amount of keywords in my text? Generally speaking it is best to use between three to seven percent of your total content text for keywords. This makes sure you have a sound balance between valuable content and SEO.

4. Did I check if I have keywords in my anchor text? This is especially important for the anchor text of inbound links, because this is regarded as getting a vote from the site that links to you.

5. Have I made sure that the keywords are in my headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)? Search engines also look for keywords in your headings. Make sure the headings are content related.

6. Did I place my keywords in the beginning of a document? This doesn't necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.

7. Did I put my keywords in alternative tags? It's important to know that spiders don't take into account images but they do read their textual descriptions in the <alt> tag. So, when you use images on your page, don't forget to fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them.

8. Did I use my keywords in metatags on my page? Google spider often misses that but Yahoo! and MSN still rely on them. So if you are applying SEO for Yahoo! or MSN, fill these tags properly.

9. Have I measured my keyword proximity or how close in the text the keywords are? The higher the proximity, the better. It is best if your keywords are immediately one after the other (e.g. "DMXzone extension"), with no other words between them. Consider you have used "DMXzone" in the first paragraph and "extension" in the third one. This also would do, but not as much as using the phrase "DMXzone extension" without any other words in between. Note that keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.
   
   
10. Did I use keyword phrases? Yes, you can also apply SEO for keyword phrases that consist of several words – e.g. "Premium content". It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords ("Premium" and "content") than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.

11. Did I apply secondary keywords? Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a goldmine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, "real estate new jersey" might have thousand times less searches than "real estate", but if you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less, but considerably better targeted traffic.

12. Did I stem my keywords? This doesn't matter a lot in English because words that stem from the same root (e.g. cat, cats, etc.) are considered related.  Therefore if you have "cat" on your page, you will get hits for "cats" as well. In other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root might not be considered to be related and you might need to optimize for all of them.

13. Did I optimize synonyms? Optimize for synonyms of the target keywords in addition to the main keywords. This works well for sites in English, because search engines are smart enough to search for synonyms, when ranking sites. For many other languages synonyms are not taken into account.

14. Did I use named anchors? Named anchors (the target place of internal links) are useful for internal navigation but are also useful for SEO. They allow you to stress that a particular page, paragraph or text is important. In the code, named anchors look like this: <A href= "#cats">Read about cats</A>. In this piece of code "#cats" is the named anchor.

15. Did I apply keywords formatting? When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text it is more noticeable. Therefore it is more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.), which generally are in larger font size than the rest of the text. Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because otherwise you might achieve just the opposite effect.