My top 10 tips for Search Engine Success

This week I have had a lot of calls and questions about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Remember the movie "Field of Dreams?"
Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) is a farmer who lives in rural Iowa with his family. While walking through his cornfield, Ray hears a voice whisper, "If you build it, he will come" (often misquoted as "If you build it, they will come"), and sees a vision of a baseball field. Ray plows under his corn and builds the field. A year passes without incident. So many times I talk to perspective clients who were under the impression that if they built a website they would automatically get visitors and are often disappointed by the lack of traffic to their site. This is because their websites are not optimized or submitted properly to the search engines. Just because you build it, doesn’t mean anyone will come.

SEO is a tricky business and there are never any guarantees. Search Engines are constantly changing their algorithms (the way they evaluate websites). I spend at least 10 hours a week keeping up on the latest needs of the Search Engines and each site that I perform SEO on follows a different strategy based on these changing conditions. As of right now, the top ten things that I can recommend to you in order to get your website found and visited on the Internet are:

1) Make sure that you have good meta-tag programming. This is a part of the website that you cannot see but if you look at the code behind your website, the first few lines of code should contain meta-tags. The most important of these tags is the description tag where you tell the search engines what type of information can be found on your site. This tag should contain keywords that visitors might type in when looking for sites like yours.

2) Make sure that your Title tag is keyword rich. The Title tag is perhaps the most important piece of SEO. This is what appears in the very top of your browser screen and this also tells the search engines what your site is all about

3) Have site owner verification meta-tags - These are also in the programming of your site and you will need to have them programmed separately for each of the major search engines, Google, Yahoo & Bing. This tells the search engines that your site has been verified as a legitimate website and gives them the go-ahead to index your site.

4)Use H1 & H2 html tags when appropriate for keyword emphasis. Again, this is done in the programming of your website.

5)Program alternate image tags using keyword text. For each image on your website there is an option to program alternate text. Make sure that your images contain your keywords.

6)Develop a website sitemap (such as sitemap.xml) for search engine spidering. Once you have created a sitemap make sure to submit it separately to each of the major search engines. This allows them to easily index your pages.

7)Manually submit your website URL to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com & the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). 95% of all Internet searches are done using these engines or other sites that use the results of these engines.

8)Manually submit your URL to industry specific directories that allow free links. This is often the part that takes the most time but this is what will really get your website good results. This is because the search engines place a lot of weight on in-bound links. The number of quality sites linking to your website will increase your popularity.

9)Use Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 services. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to use all the Web 2.0/3.0 services available. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube, etc... The search engines look very favorably on these services and tend to index the content higher than regular web content.

10)Install a good statistics program on your website. Google Analytics is one such service and it is free. This will allow you to track how many visitors you have had, where they came from and what keywords they used to find your website. Analyzing this data can help you tweak your keyword positioning and will let you know if your site is performing well on the search engines.

I am sorry for the length of this post but there is a lot of information to cover and I haven't even scratched the surface. If you feel like your website is an empty corn field please give me a call at 715-377-0233 and we can talk about how we can get you into the major leagues. Also, for more information please visit www.wizedezigns.com Have a great day!