How do I 'optimize' my website?

geek84

Hi Folks

I am near to completing my website for a home based businessand was wondering if anybody would be kind enough to tell me how I could makesure my website comes 'near the top of the list' when someone uses a searchengine to find out more about the services that I will be offering . Is this type of thing called 'optimization?'

Thanks in advance for your response.

gustav

Here's my top 3 (free) tips, tho i'm sure other people will have others.

1. Make sure you get as much relevant info as possible in the meta tags in the header without making it look spammy.

2. Make sure the sitemap.xml is complete and correct.

3. (and not everybody thinks of this one) Give relevant names to any images you use. Dont use images with names like 45edrwst.jpg. give all images names relevant to your business. For instance, if you were a wedding planner, give your images names such as wedding_car.jpg or wedding_dress.jpg. (also don't forget to use the alt and title tags for the images.


Simples (but people do forget).

Any fresh pages i put on my site usually appear on Google within a week.

Good luck with the site

G

Hoseman

Its usually referred to as SEO but you can call it optimization. SEO is a massive subject and is mainly based around keywords that people use to search for a product, service, information, etc.

There is no easy way to rank at the top and especially if you are a new business. Unless you are a niche industry your competitors are likely to be ahead of you so you need to look at it from a long term point of view.

Google uses an algorithm to rank sites that takes into account a lot of factors such as the age of your domain, site speed, how many links you have and especially with regard to the quality of the sites that link to you.

Make sure your pages contain your keywords and you may want to add a blog for your customers as this can also be used to attract new ones via keywords. Google has a keyword tool that you can use to help you but bear in mind the figures. Use exact and phrase as these are better indicators of numbers. Dont forget to add geographical info if relevant.

robrooo

I managed to get my 2 business websites to number 1 spot on google when searching for certain words. Sadly I have now decided to close the businesses, but here is what I did. Bear in mind that it can take a few months for you to start seeing improvements, and it took 6 months before my sites started hitting the top 3 slots.

1. Optimise the site itself.

Use a tool like the reaction engine to check how well your site performs for keyword searches relevant to your business (www dot reactionengine dot com - I'm new here so can't post links!).

I found that I needed to add things like h1 headers, first paragraph etc to my site, of course containing the keywords somehow construed into a meaningful sentence! Search engines put different weight to the different structural elements in your site, so h1 is more important than h2 etc. Bear this in mind when you are adding content. Content is king for most search engines, try to create pages detailing different aspects of your business with 300 words minumum.

Meta Keywords aren't actually used by most search engines anymore, but there is a rumour that they might be coming back into fashion, and it does no harm to have them.

Think about adding a blog, but only if you can update it regularly. Blogs are held in high esteem by search engines.

As gustav says you should think about how any images are named, but also you should add title and alt elements to all images, title elements to all links, including internal.

The sitemap is a very useful tool for showing search engines what pages you have and how they are structured. For sites of less than 500 pages there are online tools that will create one for you.

2. Start a link building campaign

Links are seen by search engines a bit like votes. If lots of other sites link to your site, then its seen as popular. Here are some ways to get links to your site:

Register your business with as many online business directories you can. Most of them offer free registration (you will then be bombarded with them trying to seel you a premium listing, not sure if any of these are actually worth it, you're just after their link!). A lot of other online tools use these directories for performing their own analysis on websites, especially business ones where they try to assess your "repuation". This is useful since its another "vote", even though its kind of meaningless in the real world!

If there are trade associations in your field, some of them keep a register of businesses with links.

If you have friends or colleagues that have websites, ask them if they would be interested in a link exchange. And if you have control over the link, ask them to put something relevant to your business in the title element. For example, if your business is called Acme and you sell widgets, the title element should not need to contain your business name, but instead something like "best priced quality widgets".

If there are online fora relevant to your business, think about commenting on articles and having a link to your site in your signature. Some site let you enter your url when you comment. Even if your comment is just a simple thankyou, chances are the forum site is spidered regularly so your link will be found by search engines.

SO you want a lot of sites to link to yours, but you also don't want your site to be a "dead-end", so think about whether you can add links from your site to other relevant sites.At the very least it could be all those directories that you submitted to, maybe suppliers, trade bodies etc, and f you are doing anything with social media (next section) link to those too.

3. Social Media

This might depend on the nature of your business and how much time you have to put into it, but I have found good results from having a facebook business page, a twitter account, a pinterest board and a google+ page. I made some of mine link together, so when I tweeted it showed on my facebook page, and also on my website/blog (using a twitter widget). And when I added a new blog entry, I would tweet about it. I also got quite a lot of traffic by submitting images to pinterest and retaining the link back to the website (my businesses were in the visual arts area though). This is just the basics - t here are now whole books about using social meda for business marketing.

4. Monitor/Submit to seach engines.

Once you have optimised your site, and have built up some links, you are ready to submit your site to the search engines. Of course the main ones are google, yahoo and bing (I think yahoo might use bing now for its index?).

To be honest, google will have already found your site, but if you've just re-structured it or just added a sitemap it might be worth manually submitting. The best way is to register on Google Webmaster Tools where there is a utility to submit urls, and also to register your sitemaps (I would avoid any mass submission tools, they might discredit your site). The webmaster tools also provide some useful stats on your visitors, and if you want to get really indepth you can also register on Google Analytics.

Another traffic/rank analysis site is Alexa. Although there is some doubt about how realistic its stats are (its gathered only from people using the alexa toolbar on their browser) it does provide some relative info, and google is rumoured to use some of its data in its pagerank algorithm. If you can get someone to review your site on Alexa and give a good star rating, this will boost your rank.


That's all I can think of for now, although there are probably a lot of other things you can do. Remember that it will take time, and even if you come out at number one spot, you always need to refine your SEO efforts to stay there.

Rob

googler

geek84 wrote: »

I am near to completing my website for a home based businessand was wondering if anybody would be kind enough to tell me how I could makesure my website comes 'near the top of the list' when someone uses a searchengine to find out more about the services that I will be offering . Is this type of thing called 'optimization?'

Whether you get to the top will depend on what people are searching for when they look for your kind of business. If you're competing with more popular websites and common keywords, it'll be tough.

It's easy to get to the top with infrequently-used keywords, but there's little value in that since few people will be searching with them.

googler

seoleela wrote: »

i don't believe nowadays that kind of sites will ever move up on the search engine. search engines has put stringent quality control on their algorithm to give better search result to searchers. so don't waste your time to get traffic for that site. make better recycled cell phone site first before looking for traffic unless your main target is just to get

Back in town, Yoda is, posting the nonsense, he does....

fwor

seoleela wrote: »

i don't believe nowadays that kind of sites will ever move up on the search engine. search engines has put stringent quality control on their algorithm to give better search result to searchers. so don't waste your time to get traffic for that site. make better recycled cell phone site first before looking for traffic unless your main target is just to get

Yet another forum profile link spammer, this would be.

kwikbreaks

manishyadav2 wrote: »

Hello Guys,
I confuse if get more traffic and relevant visitor get. what is seo services company in india. i want to free traffic in my website tell me more suggestion.

Well what you could try is hiring some bods in India to search on relevant phrases (such as SEO) then register on the forum the question got asked and post a semi-literate comment. You can then have a different spammer reply (or the same one with a different id) posting links to the site you want to promote.

Best not do it on forums full of nasty cynical people who will think you are spamming even if you are not though. Or sites like this which don't allow links until the user has a fair few posts under their belt.

freewheelinfranklin

A huge, HUGE subject but very simply you need to:

1. Select an appropriate set of keywords you are going to target.
2. Build your site in a SILO'd fashion (this is just ensuring that your content is categorised correctly).
3. Ensure your on-site optimisation is spot on. Every page should focus on one or two (at most) keywords and the keyword should appear in the title tag, the H1 tag, the H2 tag (optional), in an image filename and an image ALT tag, in a hyperlink (you should consider linking to an authority in your market) and at least 2 or 3 times in 1000+ words of content.
4. Keep performing off-site optimisation until your site reaches the top spots. Off-site optimisation is mainly link building but you need to be very careful where you acquire your links these days. Google is getting vey good at detecting 'unnatural links'.

A top tip is to try and get visitors from varied sources. Google now seems to be favouring sites which receive traffic from places OTHER THAN google!

Good luck, it's a deep rabbit hole!

gb12345

manishyadav2 wrote: »

Hello Guys,
I confuse if get more traffic and relevant visitor get. what is seo services company in india. i want to free traffic in my website tell me more suggestion.

I can 100% recommend www.wedontspamforumsseo.com.

thaimeister

Use the Google Keyword tool for your keyword research. Remember to tick the "exact" box rather than the "broad" box before searching your keywords. It will give you the monthly global and local searches for your specified words and similar suggestions.
You want to find keywords with a high volume of searches but with low competition. When you find these relevant keywords use them in the body of your content, page titles etc but don't overdo it.
Use a blog on your site and update it as much as possible, again using your keywords.