| Long gone are the days when a company could simply build a website and expect it to perform well. This is especially true in the world of e-commerce and on-line sales, where competition can be fierce. In modern times every website launched will need to take advantage of the services offered by a search engine optimisation (SEO) firm to ensure its ultimate success. However what about those business owners who are not able to afford the services of an SEO professional at first? Surely there are some basic steps that can be taken to ensure that a website is optimized for search engines? Below we will present some basic search engine optimization tips for the layman.Domain name and URL – Always make sure that your domain name is indicative of the services you offer. Quite simply an online camera store using the domain name wesellstuff.com would do far less well than one which employed the domain name camerasforsale.com if both were the same age and had the same amount of promotion and SEO performed on them. In a similar fashion it is important that the page URLs within the site structure are relevant. Using the camera shop as an example again http://www.camerasforsale.com/discount_slr_cameras.htm would be far better than http://www.camerasforsale.com/cams?123.META data – All page titles, META descriptions and META tags should be 100% relevant to the pages. Page titles are especially important and fall a close second behind the domain name and URL structure in being the most effective SEO techniques to use. When it comes to the META keywords do not be tempted to stuff this string with too many keywords.� Keep the list of key phrases short and always remember that the most weight is given to the key phrases at the left hand end of the string, with the weight diminishing moving to the right.Content is king – Make sure that your website content is refreshed regularly. Regular and new content is the best way to keep the search engines coming back to index your site, as well as ensuring that the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN see your website as not being stagnant, hence more likely to be returned higher in the search engine ranking position. Fresh content is also a great way to gain new visitors and hopefully a good selection of organic backlinks over time.Start link building – One of the main tasks performed by a search engine organization company is the building of backlinks. These links directly affect how popular the major search engines deem your site to be. This in turn affects the likelihood of your site being returned high in search engine results.So there we have it, three very simple tips designed to give the SEO layman a few ideas upon how best to tackle top level SEO for any website. Although these tips only scratch the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the techniques employed by a professional search engine optimisation firm, they are among the most successful techniques employed. |
