SEO(T) - Search Engine Optimization Tips

To be found or not to be found? That is the question.

Today people spend serious dough on what is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. What's that you ask? Its improves the likelihood that people will a) find your website and b) when they find your website that they were actually looking for it. As with anything it can be a science and a full time job on. There are now companies that exist for that sole benefit. But if you understand it, you don't have to break the bank over it.

Here are some tips/tricks specific to Google[TM] but applicable to other search engines on improving your page rankings:

1) LINKS: It's important that other websites link to yours and that those sites are quality and reputable i.e. not just anyone and nothing underhanded. It is even healthier and better to have reciprocal links. So if your clients don't compete with your services i.e. you sell janitorial supplies and your link partner is a maid service, it would be a great idea to trade links support each other. Start a linking campaign.

2) TITLE TAGS: Make sure that the title (seen at the very top of the browser and programmed in the "head" of the source code) is pertinent to your site and to what is on that page.

3) KEYWORD DENSITY: This refers to the content on your page and specifically the keywords. If you are selling puppies and you mention them once on your page and then have a whole bunch of pictures, you page isn't very dense. If you mention puppies 50 times on that same page, that's density you can cut through with a knife!

4) KEYWORD LINKS: Links to your website should say more than "click here." For example if you sell puppies, a link with the text "Purebred Maltese Puppies" pointing at your site will cause your site to be listed earlier if a visitor searches for "Maltese puppies" than if the link simply said "click here".

5) ALTERNATE TAGS ON IMAGES: Since images are sometimes names "38756.jpg" or any strange variety of letters and numbers on your website, a search engine isn't going to figure out that that's a picture of Brad Pitt, unless you changed it's name to "BradPitt.jpg." So the solution is to place ALT tags on images. In Brad's case it might be tags such as . You get the picture.

6) META TAGS: The Meta Keywords tag used to be an important way to get your page listed under specific keywords under the search engines. Nowadays major search engines like Google and Alta Vista ignore this tag, and the keywords tag no longer has the significance it used to have in the early days of the web. You probably remember when you use to do a search for a "car" and 10 adult sites would pop-up. They put "car" in their meta tag, and this is probably when Meta tags don't have the same weight they use to.

Though the benefits conferred by using the various meta tags on your page is not substantial, they are nonetheless useful in controlling how the search engines index and list your page. Since tags like the description and robots tag require very little effort to add to your page, it is probably a good idea to add at least these tags to your pages. So you can slug them in and sleep easy at night.

7) MANUAL SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSIONS: Go to each of the major search engines and make sure your URL is listed with them. Make sure you have a list of keywords handy, as they will ask you for this. This is time consuming, but a FREE service. This should be done yearly.

8) PAID ADVERTISEMENTS/PAY-PER-CLICK: All the tips above relate to what they call a "natural" search. But the best way to guarantee that your website ranking is to define your prescribed criteria and then BUY it. There is no such thing as a free lunch. How it works is that you select the keywords you want to be found under. Those keywords have a different cost depending on popularity i.e. "dog" might cost $1 a click while "runt" will only cost $.05 a click.

You only pay for what was clicked. So if you budgeted $10 for "dog" after 10 users click through the ad to your website your ad won't come up on top of the search anymore. You can outbid the highest purchaser of that word i.e. $1.10 to guarantee your name comes up first every time till you have exhausted your budget. You can do this with as many relevant words as you please. Your search engine vendor will be able to provide you with access to reports on how your rankings, number of click throughs, and budgets. From there you can constantly play with your key words and budgets till you find a winning combination.

Hopefully this helped explain and demystify the SEO monster. Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to add some SEO magic to your website. Just YELL!

yael@YELLmedia.com.