Search Engine Optimization

17th July, 2008

Recently I have taken quite a bit of initiative on proper practices of search engine optimization. Many companies go for the outsource option and spend thousands and thousands of dollars on hiring Mr.SEO.com to get them in the top 10 natural listings on major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.). I am sorry to say that they are wasting their money.

Being an in-house designer, photographer, videographer, marketing and advertising specialist, print designer, web developer, ok I’ll stop. Anyway, I have been busy to say the least. The President of my company had proposed that we go with a specific SEO company located in Nevada. I found this to be crazy. Why give an unknown company out of state a lot of money, often, to do things I felt I could teach myself and implement, myself? At the time we had a web programmer that worked side-by-side with me. Between the two of us, we were able to understand the basic concepts of how to go about doing these tasks. After so many months of being very proactive, our internet business is within the top 5 natural listings for all of our keywords we use.

The basic web optimization procedures any website should practice are as follows;

  1. Sitemap
  2. Meta tags
  3. Content
  4. Blog
  5. Link Exchange

Granted, I spend a lot more time on other things but the five bullets above give a basic outline on what you must have, and they have to be updated quite often.

A site map represents the sturcture of your web site.  A document in any form used as a planning tool for the site that lists all your pages. It must be organized in hierarchical fashion. This is what gets the ‘bots’ to be able to search and cache your webpages for search engines to be able to list them.

A meta tag is an element that is used to provide data about the website. These give page descriptions, keywords and any other information placed in the header of the html.

The content of your website is the text that you implement throughout the site. It is extremely important to put in proper and appropriate content so as to receive the proper listings and receive the viewers you are wanting to get. If you are creating a website about trees, your content should discuss trees.

A blog is something many companies do not use. Although, the ones that maintain and update on a consistent basis find great results. These blogs show visitors updates to the content they are seeking and give a personal touch to the subject at hand.

Link Exchange between one site and another with similar content creates higher page ranking with search engines and is a vital source in higher listings. Link exchange can, though, be a detrimant if not done correctly. In some cases, it is ok to not have link exchange at all, and link within one’s website properly.

Other than the things listing above, there are many things that can help and / or hurt one’s seo capabilities and progress. It does take someone in the know-how to implement these things on a daily basis correctly. Instead of spending too much money outsourcing, do your homework and ask people that have gotten good results doing it themselves (like myself).

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