How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

Introduction

The objective of Search Engine Optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site. Below are some tips to help you accomplish this goal.

Things You'll Need

• Web site

Steps

1 Step One

Avoid site design issues. Certain web site designs give some search engine problems. For the best results, avoid the following:

Use of Frames.
Use Dynamic URLs.
Use of Flash.
Use of Image Maps for navigation.
Use of Javascript for navigation.

2 Step Two

Select a powerful title tag. This is the most important criteria since most search engines place the highest level of importance on this tag. Try to keep your text between 50-80 characters as there is a limit and try to include both the site title and a keyword phrase.

3 Step Three

Optimize every page on your website. This is often overlooked and can help you compete with your competition for less widely used keywords

4 Step Four

Optimizing your Page Content. Always keep in mind as you write site content he keywords your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

5 Step Five

Add the keyword and description meta tags. While search engines don't place as much importance on these two tags as they used to - it is still important to add them in to each page and include relavent keyword phrases.

6 Step Six

Add alt attributes to image tags. Some search engines do look at alt attributes, so it is best if you provide a brief keyword phrase to each of your images.

7 Step Seven

You should not try and trick search engines as they have extensive rules for what they consider spamming and will actually penalize your site for these violations (see the warnings)

8 Step Eight

Related Links. Links from related or relevant sites are more important than generic links from unrelated websites. Links are seen as "votes" of quality content. Search engines weigh links from websites that contain related or similar content more importantly, than links from unrelated websites. Work to obtain relevant quality links from related or authority websites.

9 Step Nine

Update Content. Search engines give higher preference to websites that change their content on a frequent basis. Try to add new content or webpages daily or weekly to increase a search engine spider's frequency.