Search Engine Optimization, (SEO) is the process of getting your site “noticed” online and has plagued the web community for years as a very in-depth topic. If you search on the internet for SEO you will see multiple companies offering to optimize your website for a monthly or flat fee.
For those of us you looking for a quick and cheap way to improve your site rankings, here are 4 tips to get you started properly optimizing your website and help you improve your website placement in Google and most other search engines.
1) Make sure your website content relevant and original: This means that if you create a website about your Abbotsford Garden Center – make sure your content is ABOUT your Abbotsford Garden Center – don’t start writing pages about the real estate market in Abbotsford!
I know it can be tempting to copy and paste information from another person’s website- but YOU MUST make sure your website content is ORIGINAL – Google knows if you have copied and pasted from another site and will not give your site much weight or importance.
2) Add metatags and keywords: This is a debate amongst many website designers – some say that Google no longer recognizes website keywords as being relevant to your site because of all the black hat SEO that is going on. (Black Hat SEO is the term used for illegitimate website marketing) However, until Google tells us that it specifically does not recognize metatags and keywords – I suggest you still add 10-20 keywords to your site’s index page. (Please note these keywords must be relevant to your website’s content – if you have a website about your garden center you should not be using the keyword “Hot Girls” if you do this, you could be banned from Google – and it is nearly impossible to get back in!)
3) Use Text: Some developers will use images for the entire site – even though the images may have text within them, Google’s crawlers do not recognize text within images. This is a big problem with older sites and flash based sites! Make sure you design your site using css or tables with real text based content, otherwise your site will rank poorly – or NOT AT ALL!
4) Add a Sitemap: A site map is very easy to add to your site – there are many free sitemap builders available on the web. The one that I use is:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Although this list will give you a good starting point to optimize your website, it is not exhaustive. If you would like to know more ways to improve your site’s rankings I would suggest doing further research on the web. There are plenty ways to optimize your site for search engines and the best techniques are often FREE!