Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Typically, the higher a site’s “page rank” (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. Below are a list of what we consider to be important SEO tips.

1. Find the best keywords
   Invest some energy into finding the best keywords that meet your needs. Developing a list and plan of attack should be your first step to optimizing your website. There are several SEO tools available online to help you find the best keywords. When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous. The results will usually return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.
2. Discover your competitors
   Search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
3. Optimize Your Title
   The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. SEO Expert’s have experimented with these two pieces of code to help reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them.
4. Optimizing your website page’s title
   There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), it is best to keep the title under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page.
5. Optimize your META tags
   META tags are hidden code snippets read only by search engine web crawlers. They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are Meta and Description

   Sequencing of these tags is extremely important. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, a significant difference has been noticed when one has the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

   The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. There’s also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. If you want your listing to look clear and to the point, a tip for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times. Here’s the syntax:

   <meta name="description" content="your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product or service." />

   The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google’s search engine algorithm. Based on experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in the tag (including spaces). If you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it’s usually a good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don’t waste your time including keywords that aren’t used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique. Here’s the syntax:

   <meta name="keywords" content="fishing flies, fly fishing flies, fly fishing, fly fishing accessories" />

6. Use Headings
   Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1 and H3 tags when assembling your page. Using cascading style sheets (CSS), you can make your H1 at the top of your page more appealing.
7. Use TITLE and ALT attributes
   Using the TITLE attribute in your HTML tags is a direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link. It’s also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to disabled people. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads TITLE and ALT attributes. An example of the syntax is as follows:

   <a href=”http://www.blueflycafe.com” title=”Fly Fishing Flies”>Fly Fishing Flies</a>

   The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the TITLE Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here’s how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:

   <img src=”http://www.blueflycafe.com/images/featured-fishing-fly.jpg” title=”Featured Fishing Fly”>

8. Use nomenclatures
   Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is “fishing flies” you’ll want to save the images used on that page as fishing-flies-01.jpg -or- fishing_flies_01.jpg. It’s not confirmed, but many have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.

   More important is your web page’s filename. Your filename for the fishing flies page could be fishing-flies.html -or- golf_putters.html -or- /fishing-flies for content management platforms using search results for building pages. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename.

9. Create a site map page
   PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. What it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That’s where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content.
10. Include a robots.txt file
    One of the easiest search engine optimization tips you will ever do is to include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up your favorite text editor and type User-agent: *. Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your website. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to crawl every page of your website.

    Because search engines analyze everything it indexes to determine what your website is about, it may be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding Disallow: /folder_name/ -or- Disallow: /filename.html in your robots.txt file.

11. Install a sitemap.xml for Google
    Google wants to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. They’ve even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you’ll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

    A great tool for creating your sitemap.xml file can be found at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. Simply create your sitemap.xml file, upload to your websites root directory and submit it to Google Sitemaps.

12. Validate your code
    There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website’s source code. The four most important are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.

    Check for broken links at: http://validator.w3.org/checklink

    Check for valid HTML at: http://validator.w3.org/

    Check for valid CSS at: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator

These tips are a great starting point for building your site to be search engine friendly. For assistance with search engine optimization techniques and practices for your website please contact us.

Call (315) 342-4815