Great Search Engine Placement in 7 Steps

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Great Search Engine Placement in 7 Steps

Follow these simple steps and your web site will be Search Engine Friendly and the Search Engines will reward you by giving your site higher relevance - and higher relevance means Higher Search Engine Rankings

Know what you expect from your web site. Have a clear vision of your strategic goals for the site. Are you just hoping to inform potential customers about your product or service? Are you hoping to actually make sales from the web site? Are you hoping to attract visitors to visit your physical store? Are you trying to demonstrate the superiority of your product or service over another's? Clear expectations will lead to better results.
Know your potential visitors - what are they looking for? What words might they use when searching for you. It's not enough to say "widgets" - it's much better to say "Vancouver Widgets" or "Red Widgets." By knowing your visitors you can develop better content for them and you can identify the keywords you'll target your site to rank well with.

Develop a set of 20 - 30 keywords or keyword phrases (e.g. "Vancouver Widgets" is a keyword phrase). The more specific the better, but remember that they have to be words your potential customers will actually use. Not the words you would use. Remember that your visitors are not as informed as you and are often starting with a minimal understanding of what they are looking for. For example, "Vancouver Widget Manufacturer" as a keyword phrase will probably get you better results than "Precision Widget Assembly Plant."
Content is king - always focus on creating written content on your web site that will inform visitors of who you are, what you do, how you do it, why they should choose you and what makes you different. The general rule of thumb is, if it's interesting and useful for your visitors then the Search Engines will consider it relevant. Make sure your keywords are used extensively throughout the content.
Construct your site to take advantage of the built in features of HTML that Search Engines look for. These include <META> tags, <H> heading tags, <TITLE> tags, <ALT> tags for images, descriptive text in hyperlinks (e.g. "Widget Gallery" rather than "click here") and descriptive filenames.
Layout your sites to provide clear text-based navigation links that are consistent on every page. This is easier for Search Engines and visitors alike. If the Search Engine can't follow your links, your visitors probably can't either. Also, place your important information, particularly keyword-rich text near the top and the bottom of each page. Many search engines only read the first and last 200 characters on a page. Always include a duplicate set of text-based navigation links at the bottom of the page.
Encourage other sites to link to you, ideally with keyword-rich text-based links, such as ""Vancouver's best widget manufacturer." Google in particular gives a lot of relevancy to the number of incoming links for a site.
Never engage in any unethical Search Engine practices. These may help short term but will ultimately get you banned. These include, hidden text (same colour as background), overuse of keywords, hidden links, gateway pages and mirrors. Visit the resources section of our website for more info about these practices.

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