Market Your Business for Free: Search Engine Optimization

SEO, or search engine optimization, is where you prepare your website to be indexed by the major search engines. How well you prepare your website will determine how well your website performs in the search engines. What I mean by this is how well your website ranks and whether or not it is found in the first page of the results.

Now, there are a lot of techniques you can use to optimize your website. This article is not all inclusive. I will outline the basic techniques, as well as talk about on page and off page optimization.

First, on page optimization is where you optimize the elements of your page. You do not optimize a website for the search engines; you optimize a page. It's one of the reasons why you'll have different pages ranking for different keywords.

Start by selecting keywords before you create your website and optimize each page for a different keyword. This will allow you to rank for multiple keywords instead of just one or two. This gives you a chance to get more traffic because you have more opportunities for first page rankings, and this traffic will be targeted.

Next, write keyword rich content. Include good titles, meta keywords, and descriptions. Although these elements won't help you with your search rankings, per se, it is what searchers will see when they find you in the results. You want to give them a reason to visit your website, so writing good descriptions will help with this. (You can get software that will help you with optimization, so it's worth it to invest in this type of software and get rid of the guesswork.)

Off page optimization relates to factors outside of your website. This includes things like linking. When another website links to your site, these links are like a vote for your page. Linking is probably one of the most important factors because it affects Google Page Rank. Page rank is how Google decides how important the page is. Page rank is usually the result of having a lot of links pointing back to your page.

The most important thing you can do here is to take care of your search engine optimization as you build your site. Don't wait until you have built it and then decide to optimize it. It will make it a lot harder for you to optimize for the search engines once your site is built because you'll have to rewrite a lot of content. Try to write SEO optimized content as you go.

Although search engine optimization is important to building sites that rank well in the search engines, I would highly recommend you use other marketing techniques besides this one. Search engines don't buy anything. People do. Remember that when you're marketing.

SEO Birmingham is part of the UK SEO Network. Please also visit our sister sites SEO Scotland and SEO Sheffield [l]