Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The Basics

When it comes to search engine optimization you are talking about an extremely lengthy process. It can take anywhere from a week to six months for the search engines to index your page! Therefore, if you are truthfully interested in search engine optimization you must be patient.

Once again, great content is the key to search engine optimization, as it also is for receiving a high quality score. Great content includes several valuable traits such as: Originality, new content, grammar, and factual information. If these traits are all met you will have visitors advertising your site for free! They will most likely be referring other people to your site and in addition returning themselves!

Next, when designing your site do NOT use a bunch of flash items. Not only does this slow down your site but it can significantly hurt your search engine optimization. You definitely should not use any items for your titles and headers. Only use h1 - h6 headings for your page. This helps the spiders crawling your site understand what the site is about.

Lastly, you MUST get linked to. In order to maximize your search engine optimization you must be linked to by other high ranked sites. This will cost money, but in the end will be worth it. It'll roughly cost $50 a month to be linked to a descent site. Also, by having great content and having return visitors increases the possibility that your site is linked to for free. Other sites will only do this if your information is extremely valuable and they want their visitors to read it.

If you follow every one of these steps carefully you will have a great web page that shows up in search engines. However, there is no guarantee that you will be ranked on the top page. There are a million other factors that come into place and I will discuss later in further detail, but you must accomplish all these steps to have a chance at being on the top page.

Good luck at starting on your search engine optimization journeys!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

You've written a good description of how to optimize your site so the search engines will like it.

I appreciate the advice on not using too much flash. If a site looks like it's only out to get my money, I run for the hills (or at least the next site).:)

All the best,
Theresa