SEO for average website owners

While working on our latest project and doing our SEO check list, we decided to go one step further and started googling to see what other web masters have to say about SEO. As expected, SEO is a popular theme, but not much is written for average website owners - much of it even we couldn't understand. So, we decided to write some usefull and understandable informations about SEO. Here you will find a short introduction to SEO, and 10 things every website owner should know.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization

The whole concept is easy – better position on search engines typically brings more traffic to your site.
The advantage of advertising your services or product on your website is that the user that came across your website is allready interested in purchasing whatever you are offering. But, as the service of the search engines is free for all users, they don't give you any guarantee that your website will be found. That is where SEO comes in.

How does SEO work?

SEO techniques are based on: 1. algorithms used by search engines for website ranking, and 2. keywords that are used by targeted audience when looking for informations.

Three basic and most important steps for effective SEO are:

1. well written content,
2. good website structure, and
3. clean code.

What to expect from high-quality SEO?

Time spent on writing a good content, organizing the site structure and technical execution, are sufficient for good results. Also, give your users usefull informations and organize them in simple ways. That is called user-oriented SEO - not only the most effective but also the cheapest way for good website ranking.

Black hat SEO.

Over the time, these techniques did make some positive results, but only in short-terms. Once you start to realize in what ways search engines work, you could be temptated and start stuffing your text with unneeded keywords, or start putting some hidden keywords over your web site. But, be aware that todays algorithms degrade search results of this kind of websites. In some cases, they even turn these websites out of search results.

Check-list for your own website

1. While writing your keywords, don't forget to use singulars and plurals, where needed.
   
   Quick tip: When choose keywords, try to avoid industry words and phrases, unafamiliar for common users. Instead, take some time and try to come up with words that user would use if searching for the service or product you are offering.
2. Keywords density in body text shold be between 10-20% depending on topic. Check keyword density on your web site:
   http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/
3. Keywords shoud appear in headlines.
4. Instead using read more phrase, use keywords as anchored text.
5. For all photo content, use tags with keywords included in them.
6. Create XML site map and submit it for search engines.
7. Excange links with as many websites as you can. Whenever it is possible, ask people to put a link to your website.
8. Add new content on regular basis - write a blog, have a news section or just add new page under existing links - search engines love fresh content.
9. Do not use more than 100 links to external pages. These kind of sites are called Link Farms and their search rankings can be penalized.
10. Apply website for Web catalogues

Usefull links:

http://websitegrader.com

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

But, if you still need some help, feel free to contact us

Comments

Post your comment

E-mails are used only for the purposes of commentary and are not visible to anybody.

4 + 3 =