Do-It-Yourself SEO Tips
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the Internet’s equivalent to the Yellow Pages. If your business website doesn’t show up in search engine results, you might as well not exist to millions of potential customers. Optimizing your website is a fairly straightforward process. Before you hire an SEO consultant, try doing these SEO strategies yourself.
Link Exchange
One of the most important factors that determine your search engine rank is the quality and number of sites that link back to your website. Your linkbacks determine how much authority your website has, and the number is assigned a rank relative to other websites in your niche or target market. To increase your site’s ranking and credibility, you need other websites relevant to your topic to link you.
Although link backs will help your site greatly, your SEO ranking will improve even more if the anchor text of the links contain keywords that are related to your website’s products or services. For instance, don’t ask for links with “click here” as the anchor text. Instead, ask your link exchange partners to use anchor texts like, “quality LCD monitors” or “cheap tickets”. Search engines give you more points by counting the linkback itself and the link’s reinforcement of your site’s importance.
Keywords
To get a high SEO ranking, you’ll need to pepper your content with appropriate keywords and phrases that you can use to promote your site. Don’t use broad, generic keywords like “cars” or “bags” - your site will only get lost in a sea of other websites on page 53 of Google’s results. You also don’t want to use keywords that are too narrow that very few people are likely to search for them.
The trick to coming up with the right keywords is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think of what words they would use to search for your product. This means using “ordinary language” instead of industry lingo. If you’re not sure what keywords you can use for your site, you can use free online tools like Google’s Keyword Tool to help you figure out the most appropriate keywords. You can also use Google’s Traffic Estimator Sandbox to look for keywords with high customer demand.
Do not, however, stuff your site with too many keywords. Search engines become suspicious of websites that overdo keyword insertion. Your text copy or content should appear like a normal sales copy or a normal conversation. Ideally, the keyword density of your website’s content should be less than 15%. This means that for every 100 words on each page, you should not have more than 15 of these as your keywords.
Keywords in Images
Search engines can’t read graphics, but you can boost your website’s SEO impact using the images on your page. How? By titling and tagging them appropriately. This means renaming jpeg’s, gif’s, and all non-text files with names that include relevant keywords. For instance, a photo of a Honda Civic should be renamed from “honda-civic123b.jpg” to “honda-civic.jpg” if you want any SEO benefits related to the “Honda Civic” keyword. The alt tag is also a great place to insert keywords.