This article is a brief overview on some of the many effective strategies to help your potential customers find your website. I’d like to answer one of the most common questions we get here at Gorges Web Sites: how do I get good rankings in Google?
You may be doing many of these already, others you’ve heard of but haven’t done, and there may be a few that are new to you. There are thousands of articles on this very topic on the Internet. I can’t claim to have read all of them, and the items in this article aren’t really earth-shattering, but perhaps will represent a kind of a summary for you to help you focus and get more traffic.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategies
The most important, and inexpensive strategy is to develop high rankings for your preferred keywords in the ‘organic’ searches, for instance on Google. So let’s start with ways to deliver to search engines concise information about what your website is all about.
1) Write a keyword-rich title for each page
Use keywords in your titles. The title of a page is very important to Google. So take great care here. Don’t use common words such as ‘and’ or ‘the’ if you can avoid them.
2) Write a description META tag
While META tags aren’t as important as they once were for search engine rankings, they still matter. A description is a sentence or two describing the content of the web page, using the keywords that page is focusing on. The first 60 characters or so will appear in Google when that page is being returned in a search result. Every page in your site should have distinct title and META description.
3) Include your keywords in the headings and sub-headings of your content
Search engines look at the headings and sub-headings (H1, H2, H3 etc) tags, to learn more about the content of your page. So craft keyword-dense headings as part of your content development efforts.
4) Position your keywords in the first paragraph of the body text
Search engines read content the way humans do, top down, so put the most important keywords and phrases early on in the content. More is not better, be judicious, but make sure you use them.
5) Include descriptive keywords in the ALT attribute of image tags
Taking this step will help your site be more useful to visitors with sight-impairments, and also helps your images find their way into the Google image library, which can bring you more traffic.
6) Use keywords in hyperlinks
Help the search engines understand what is important by using your keywords in all links. Go a bit further by using your keywords in the actual page names.
7) Make your navigation system search engine friendly
You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don’t read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site.
8 ) Create a site map
A site map page with links to all your pages can help search engines (and visitors) find all your pages, particularly if you have a larger site. You can use a free tools to create XML sitemaps that are used by the major search engines to index your webpages accurately. Upload your sitemap to your website.
9) Develop web pages focused on each of your keywords
Google ‘sees’ each page in your site as separate from the rest, so tune up each page to focus on a few specific keywords.
There is much more to SEO than this, but this should give you a good start.
Good luck in your quest for ever-higher rankings!
