Wikipedia describes it as “the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the ‘natural’ or un-paid search results.”
Search engine optimization is continually evolving. No longer can you upload a website to the internet and leave it. Constant revising, updating and evaluating is required to keep your website on the first few pages of a search. Google is the #1 used search engine in the world; in fact, Google provides the information for smaller search engines like Ask.com. So how do you get your website found by Google?
First, you need to find out what the keywords are for your business. You can guess at what the keywords are for your industry, but the better bet is to take an hour and do some research on what an internet surfer is actually using as keywords to find your business. Google offers a great tool called Ad Words that tracks what people enter into the search box on the browsers. Enter the word you think might be a keyword in the Word or phrase box in the space provided. Google will provide you with the keywords that are most used for your industry. These are the actual search terms that you want in your website.
Once you have your keywords, you now have to think about keyword density. Keyword density is how often the keywords appear in your website. On any given page of your website, 5% of the words on that page should be your keywords. An example would be if you have 100 words on the home page of your website, 5 words should be your keywords.
Keyword density not only includes the readable text on the page, it also includes your website code that the website designer uses to create your website. Examples of this are:
• The names of the photos you put on your site. Do not leave the names of your photos the name that the camera titled your photos. Rename them with appropriate keywords.
• Page Title: The page title is the blue underlined text that appears in the website search. Your titles should include your top search keywords for your industry and location as most people search locally for most businesses. If you are a national business, leave the location out.
• Page Description: This is the black text in the website search. If your website designer did not add a page description, Google will search your website for text and randomly place it for the page description. You may not approve of what is placed in the description so make sure you have control over what is seen by filling in the description with your own text. Each page in your site should have a different page description based on what is on the page.
Link Building is another important detail many businesses overlook. Link building is when other websites link to your site.
• Ask companies that you work with if they will add you as partner that they recommend with a link to your website. Make sure all chambers or organizations have links to your website in all listings.
• Create a Google account and make sure to add your website information
• Once you have a Google account, create a Google Places
The last item I recommend is to change your website on a weekly basis. Most companies want the home page of their website to be found by the searcher, so make the most frequent changes to your home page. When I design websites, I always include a title to the introductory paragraph on the home page. Every week I change the title to a similar yet slightly different title. By making one small change a week, you will see your website appear higher and higher in the rankings. This is because Google searches the internet for kept up sites. They do not want a website that is 10 years old and irrelevant to the search to show up in the results. Google’s “spiders” search the internet for updated and new sites, so the more often you change and update your site, the more Google tags you. The more you are tagged, the higher you get in the rankings.
Remember, about two-thirds of internet users click through to a link that appears on the first page of search results. Use the steps above to optimize your search engine results and maintain your ranking so potential customers can quickly and consistently find your site.