Search Engine Optimization 101

By Biz Guru

Want to get your website to show up on the search engines?  Well before you go shelling out thousands and thousands of dollars to another company think about a few steps you can handle on your own.

Navigation

How easy is your website to navigate around?  I have seen websites where you couldn’t make heads or tails of where you were.  The navigation bar was not easy to use and that meant if I was frustrated that other people would be too.  Make sure that your website works with a standard structure of top categories and then all the sub categories under those main categories.  If you offer too many products or services you may want to consider getting a second or third website.  This will allow you to optimize your website properly.

Content

It doesn’t matter whether you are selling shoes or offering an accounting service; remember that having a ton of content on everything you offer is something that the search engines all look for.  This means that your website has more relevant information to the search engines and therefore must be more important than one that has very little content.
Always remember to keep your content fresh and updated while avoiding clone text.  Clone text is when someone uses text that shows up on someone else’s website without an RSS feed or something that tells the search engines that the information is common or publicly available.  So be sure you are using good content by either writing the information yourself or hiring someone to write the information for you.

Back Links

Back Links are links to your site from other websites.  The best back links are called one way links.  This means that your website has a link from their website without having a reciprocal link.  What this tells the search engines is that your website is so important that other people link to you as an expert in whatever field you are in.  Chances are, the company who designed your website for you has a link to their website on your site to increase their own ranking.

Gaining back links can be done in one of several ways.  First off, you can write articles that go out to different websites (Obviously I use SayItAloud and would suggest you doing the same) and write an article about your field or about anything at all.  The article itself is not as important as the back link is, so consider writing several articles.  On this site you can write just about anything so it works out telling people about your vacation, insurance, or anything else you can think of.  Another way to gain back links is to use a press release service to notify the public of any changes to your business or changes to your website.  This costs a little money in most cases but again gives you back links from websites that in and of themselves have good ranking.  Finally, if you are buying advertising space on a website, ask if they offer text links as well as banner ads.  This will allow you to gain your back link for the search eengines while targeting your customers.

Consistency

The final area I will cover for now is consistency on search engine optimization.  Most search engines go to your website and look at your content.  They periodically come back to see if there is new content.  If there is enough, they reduce the time between searches until they find the optimal amount of time that goes buy before new information is on your site.  So if you are updating information on your website daily, the search engines will eventually realize that and index your site over and over again.

These are just a few of the things that you can do for yourself when it comes to search engine optimization, but for starters, following these steps will help you increase your ranking.