Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the process of designing your web pages and content to improve the chances a search engine will rank your web site higher in search results.

The first step to boosting traffic to your site is page optimization. Optimizing your page begins with creating an effective layout for your call to action. Another crucial element is search engine optimization, or SEO.

Make your important keywords stand out.
Page titles and headings are especially useful at making text stand out.

Search engines use algorithms to analyze a site’s relevance to a keyword.
All search engines have varied algorithms but they are all trying to do the same thing, return relevant results to their customers. Even though all the search engines have their own algorithms, known only to them, they all look at the same things.

They just apply different weight to how important these things are. The first thing we do is find out what keywords are relevant to the site’s content. If a phrase is highly competitive, it will take more effort to get to the top of the listings than if the term is not as competitive.

Page titles are critical.
Consider it a requirement to include your most important keyword in your page’s <TITLE> tag. Usually it is best to place the keyword phrase towards the beginning of the title. Search engines generally prefer short titles, between three to six words. Keep short phrases together for maximum effect. For example, “Widgets and Snorks by Joe" is better than "Joe is a widgets expert and snorks guru” if your keyword phrase is “widgets and snorks.”

Visitors must read your text too.
Remember, your page title will be read by web crawlers AND human visitors, who will see your page title in listings of search results. Titles that are simply a collection of keywords in odd orders may work well for bots, but people are less likely to click on the link when they see them.

Keywords in your body text.
No matter how well optimized your title and heading are, unless the text on your page also contains keyword-rich text, it will lose effectiveness. At the same, make sure your site visitors can easily read the text. You’re aiming for 2 to 4 instance of your keywords per 100 words of text. More than that and bots may think you are spamming keywords.

Quality Content
Online, content is king. Google put out an SEO Starter Guide, and one of the things they said bears repeating here, “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors... Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic, or word-of-mouth buzz, is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.”