SEO Strategies

Next to your domain name, your SEO strategy will be the "make/break" factor for the health of your website. Ironically, as important as SEO is, most website owners are intimidated by search engine strategies, and simply let their web host run a quickie submission program, that lists some VERY basic information about their site.

Successful web owners test the pulse of their web sites on at least a weekly basis. Forget hit counters, they are an exercise in absolute futility, as they just count the number of times any page on your site is requested. A single visitor can represent over 200 hits on a single visit, and search engine robots will rack up a few more hundred in the few minutes they scan your site's links.

Keywords

Keyword optimization began when you worked through your domain name checklist. Remember? You created a domain name based largely on making certain that a word or two were included in the domain name that describes the content of your website. By doing that, you insured that the most important keyword was included at the very top level of the web network.

As you build each page, you will need to build "keyword density". Make a list of the keywords that represent the page you are writing. These are the words that a visitor might type into a keyword search related to the page. As you are roughing out what you are writing for the page, use the keywords you have listed as often as you can, without making the page look rediculous. Be sure to create H1, H2 and H3 headings with the important keywords in them. You are beginning to optimize your site for SEO.

Oh... All those pretty pictures you want to use are INVISIBLE to search engines. They only see TEXT. To see how a search engine sees a page, go to the Keyword Cloud Tool at SEO Chat. Enter a url like http://www.rbsdot.com. That is how a search engine actually sees the rbsdot.com web development home page. Quite a bit different from what the real site actually looks like.

A final touch to increasing keyword density is to include a Site Map link at the bottom of your home page. Make it a two colum descriptive map. The first column is a descriptive link (with a keyword) and the right column is a paragraphical description (with keywords) of the page the link points to. This assures that search engines can easily find all of your pages, plus you get to add more keyword density to your site at the same time.

Now that you have spent the effort to create keyword density in your content, DON'T FORGET TO MAKE SURE THAT YOUR META TITLE, META DESCRIPTION AND META KEYWORDS ARE UP TO SNUFF TOO!

Search Engine Submission

At a minimum you should be sure to submit your website to Google, Yahoo, MSN and DMOZ. Google, MSN and Yahoo can be done by any good automated submitter, but you will need to manually submit to DMOZ. Don't be in a hurry to see results. The biggies can take a month or two before you begin to see any activity. DMOZ can take longer than that, because humans physically visit sites that are submitted.

Monitoring and Updating

Site stats are very valuable, but using a good SEO service or running your own SEO management application like Web Position will provide the information you will need to adequately assess where you will need to make changes. A SEO service will even be able to provide reports on how your competition is doing, compared with your website. These services include alerts to let you know when your search position has changed.

Search Engine Submission Warning!

Search engines, like Google are in business to provide accurate, fast search results. There are gimmicks that have been used to trick search engines into giving sites a higher rank. One such scheme is to buy pixels on a page, or link with "link farms", or make text the same color as the page backround so it is invisible to real people. Don't fall for the promises of quick top level positioning. You may find your site rapidly losing it's position, or worse, being dropped from the search engine index entirely.