January 22nd, 2009

How to optimize your site:

For most small businesses there are a few simple rules that you need to know and follow to help with your search engine optimization:

1. Have a good understanding of your offering

2. Know what your unique selling position is

3. Know your competition

4. Understand the resources that are available to help your campaign

5. Learn good SEO practices

To help identify your core offering it is a good idea to work on an elevator pitch for your company. How would you explain your company and your core offering if you had 20 seconds to do so. Generate a two sentence pitch that explains who you are and what your company does.

Pathway Solutions, Inc. is an outsource network infrastructure and web development company. We specialize in helping small business with planning and implementing their technology needs from networks, computers, phones, printers, workflow and online web presence.

Now that you have a good elevator pitch this can be used as a start for your keywords, page descriptions and submitting your site to the search engines.

REMEMBER:

SEO is an ongoing processes that involves getting your site and content up, review and revise on a continual basis. SEO is NOT a publish it and forget it function. It is an ongoing part of your marketing campaign.

Key design for SEO

There are many parts that make up your site relating to Search Engine Optimization. Here is a short list of the important ones that can have an immediate effect on your Search Engine Optimization.

· Titles

· Key words

· Descriptions

· Header tag description

· Body content

· Site layout and design

Each of these areas are important to your site and Search Engine Optimization. Here is why.

NOTE: With your Pathway Solutions created web sites you have 100% control over all your pages title tags, keywords and description tags on each of your pages. Read on to know why this is important.

Watch this Video to get a better idea of what is required.

seobook

Titles:

The title is probably one of the most important tags that you will be creating for each of your pages. The text in the title tag is what appears in the clickable link on the search engine results pages. This is one of the quickest and most effective adjustments you can make to influence your page’s ranking.

The title should be no more than 65 characters including spaces. An 8 – 10 word limit is a good guide line.

Here are some examples of Titles:

Pathway Solutions, Inc. – Seattle Web Design firm
Pathway Solutions, Inc. |Web Design| SEO specialist
Pathway Solutions, Inc. , Washington Network IT Outsourcing
ITPWS.com | network infrastructure | VOIP phone install

The use of separators in the title tag help to clarify the search results in the title tag. Make a unique title for each page and include one or two keywords in each title. There is NO perfect title and that is why SEO is a continual process.

Keywords:

Pick 3-4 keywords for each page. Look at the content on your page and evaluate if any of the content can be changed to include these keywords. Use the plural and misspellings of keywords.

Keywords are a list of comma separated words that are relevant to the search terms that will index your site. For example Seattle web design, web designs, designing websites Washington, websites design Seattle WA.

The truth is that keywords do not carry a whole lot of weight for google page ranking because of the abuse of keywords in the past. This was called keyword stuffing. However key words still play a role in the equations that search engines use to rank your pages. So it is a good idea to include them in the keyword section. However the other meta data on your site will probably carry more weight in the overall ranking of your page.

Descriptions:

This is the section that carries a lot of weight in the overall ranking of each page on your site. Consider the description tag as the call to action for you audience. This shows up just under the title in the search engine results. Many times the search results will bring back a description with one partial sentence and then … and then another partial sentence and again have… at the end.

This means that the search engine has used part of the description and part of the content from the web site. The key search words that are a part of each will be highlighted in bold.

When writing your description it is important to use keywords as the search engines will match these when displaying the results. A good idea is to type in the keyword search and see the results that appear so you can see who is appearing and what type of descriptions are showing in the results.

As a guideline Google will display 160 characters including spaces, MSN will show 200, Yahoo 165.

seobook

Body Content:

The body content consist of several areas that can be optimized for the search engines and the type of content that you have on your site is important to getting a good overall ranking for your site pages.

Header Tags:

The header tags that you use to lead into the body of your text, images or video files should include your keywords in the header tags. Header tags are the <H1> – <H5> tags that distinguish the text as the heading to the content that follows. Some times it is easy to just select a bold text as the header which to the human reader looks the same. However to the search engines it looks completely different.

If you are using Pathway Solutions Content Management System you will be able to choose the header tags when creating the lead into the body of your text. If you want to have this with a different look it is easy enough to change the header style using the Cascade Style Sheet created for your site.

Alt Tags:

The tags that show up on an image when the user hovers over with the mouse cursor is your Alt tag. This is text that goes along with the image. Search engines cannot tell what the image content is for gif or jpg files. Adding an Alt tag to each of your images is important to adding relevant key words to your page content. Images and video files have alt tags that can be optimized on each of your pages.

Naming image and video files

The name of your image and video files can also help to identify them to the search engines. It is my rule to not allow spaces in the name of files. So instead of Seattle downtown.jpg I would name it Seattle_downtown.jpg. Because the search engines and browsers are going to read the first files as Seattle%20downtown.jpg and not all browsers are going to treat this image the same. Prior to loading images to your Content Management system follow these simple rules.

Optimize your image for the web. 72 dpi, 640 x 480 should be as large of a file that you load up to your site but if you only are going to use the thumb nail you can just load it up and create a thumb to display on the page. Again this is something you have control over with the Content Management system from Pathway Solutions.

Body Text

Here are some simple rules for keywords in the body of your text.

· Optimize keyword density should be between 3-10%. Avoid using the same word more than once in a sentence. Check keyword valuators to determine the exact density percentage.

· Maximize use of keywords in the top half of your page. Many search engines do not go beyond 25-50% of the total page.

· Be smart and spell your keywords with variations and also include plurals.

The body of text for your site should be concise and easy for your human readers include a call to action on each page. Remember this is why you are developing the SEO techniques is to get humans to see your site. So you need to make your text easy for them to read while thinking about driving traffic with SEO.

Short relevant paragraphs are easier for people to scan through and get the relevant information that they are requesting out of your site. Use bold and italicized content to call attention to the important parts of your site content. The search engines will also note these sections in their decision to include the content in the results of the pages.

SEO Basic Training Part 4 of 4

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