I am the Director of a just-launched company called WebXcel (www.mywebxcel.com), a company that specializes in website development, and website marketing, or SEO and SEM to be precise. So, WebXcel will help you with your website development or enhancement project, and help you or your company excel you on the web!
WebXcel is also interested in developing its own websites, since I am a writer and I like to write on various topics. The first of “our own website” that WebXcel developed is www.gofornaturalremedies.com , or GFNR for short.After its launch on 12th January, 2010, I told Jaideep, a friend of mine, about it. The first thing he asked me was: “Are you going to do SOE on it, and if so, do you need help with it? I have a friend who specializes in it and he will be glad to help you out”. Then he asked me what the website was all about, and after I told him that, he complimented me on my efforts, wished me luck, and promised that he would check out the website later!
The point of telling this story (besides doing a tongue-in-cheek promotion of my websites :-) is that though Jaideep said the acronym incorrectly – he said SOE instead of SEO – he knew that some such thing exists, and also that it is very important! SEO indeed has become important today,probably the most important exercise of your website development/enhancement activity. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry knows about it. And what do you know? Every Liz, Melinda, and Becky knows about it as well! J In case, you are one of those few who has missed the bus and doesn’t know what SEO is, or doesn’t know about it enough, this article will help you get up to speed on the topic. So the next time SEO is the topic-du-jour around the water cooler in your company, you won’t be the one whose face turns red, out of embarrassment of course!
So what is SEO? Well, SEO is the process of doing something to your website so that it shows up as high as possible in the search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Bing, just to name a few. And the reason to do it is very simple. If your website shows up high in the search results, more people will come to know about your website, and that means more free business for your company.
Free business!!?? I like that! Tell me more, dude! I knew that would catch your attention. If you read the sentence carefully, it says that you will get free business after your website shows up high in the search results. But getting to that stage is far from free! Companies charge a whole lot to do SEO of your website. And that’s not the end of the story. You have to keep doing something on a regular basis to ensure that your website stays high in the search results. It’s not that the search engines will demote you if you don’t do anything. But if some other website has better content, then search engines will start showing them above yours.
Damn! That sucks! Alright, tell me what is that “something” that I have to do? Okay, now that you are ready to either to shell out big bucks or grind it out yourself, I will tell you all about the nitty gritty. But before I do that, it is important to understand that different search engines give different degrees of importance to the different factors listed below, but by and large, if you follow most of them, you will start appearing in the search results of the search engines.
Meta tags: If all the pages in your website have good title, keywords, and description, it is much easier for search engines to figure out what the page is about. What are meta tag you ask? Well, meta tags are part of your web page. If you do “View -> Source” in IE or hit Ctrl-u in Firefox or Chrome, you will see it at the very beginning with <title>, <meta name="keywords">, and <meta name="description">. with The title contains a couple of keywords and also captures the essence of your webpage, preferably in less than 60 characters, because that is all that Google reads! Other search engines read more characters, but since 70% of the searches on the internet are performed on Google, you are better off obeying the 60-character rule. Keywords field contains the keywords for which your webpage is relevant. Although you might be tempted to add keywords that have more traffic, it is better to stick to the ones that your webpage is really about and can be found in its text. Description is a field that should contain relevant keywords and also describe the essence of your webpage.
H1, H2, H3 tags: These are the first, second, and third level headings that appear on ever webpage, and are very important. The major headings on a webpage go in these tags, and chances are that is what the web page is about. So be very careful when you come up with the text to go in these tags.
Page content: This is the most important part of a webpage. As they say: content is king! I would like to slightly modify and make a bolder statement: content was king, content is king, and content will always be the king! Since the advent of SEO, what people have started doing is stuffing their page content with keywords to get the attention of the search engines. While that might have been beneficial at one point in time, it is worth remembering that search engines are also getting smarter. And if they decide to downgrade websites that routinely employ keyword stuffing as a strategy, it can lead to disastrous consequences. The ideal solution is to use keywords in your page content, but they shouldn’t be more than 6% of a webpage’s content. And forget SEO for a moment, why not think about your website visitors? The page content should read like real content right? Otherwise, they will get pissed and never return to your website. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?
Page URL: The name of our website is gofornaturalremedies.com. What do you think the website is about? If you guessed "natural remedies", you guessed right, but it doesn't mean that you can change your last name to Einstein. The website has to be about "natural remedies". Duh! And that is exactly what the search engines decipher too. And this rule applies to other parts of the URL as well.
Total number of pages: If your website has 5000 pages, odds are that you will find more info on it than a website that contains only 10 pages right? So no matter how good a job you have done with SEO, a website that has more total number of pages will show up higher in search engine results that your website. And that brings me to that "you have to keep doing something on a regular basis" part. You have to give reason to your visitors to come back to your website, or they won't! It's as simple as that. A website that gets updated on a regular basis is like a living, thriving ecosystem, while one that doesn't is a pool of stagnant water. Of course, there could be a website with only 10 webpages, that hasn't changed in ages, but it could be the one that is "just what you are looking for", and the one with 5000 pages could be all junk as far as you are concerned! But odds of that happening are low. And even if it does, its utility will be over once you have read those 10 pages.
Back links: All search engines give importance to the fact that other websites link to your website. And the logic behind that is: if others consider your website worthy enough of keeping a link to it on their website, then odds are that it is worthy. It is called the principle of collective intelligence. So try to increase the links to your website. Ask relevant websites to keep a link to your website in their "links" section. And needless to say, the higher the page ranks of those websites, the better it is for you. But if you overdo this, and become a part of what is called a "link farm", you might get into trouble one day. I personally know an instance where a clique of websites had achieved a terrific page rank and traffic and was about to get sold for more than a $1 million, when Google changed their algorithm, decided to punish link farms, which resulted in the websites getting penalized and the deal getting cancelled! So think twice before you become part of link farms, and before you do things that most search engines consider as "shady" and termed as "black hat SEO". Instead, do things "the right way" and do what is called "white hat SEO" or "organic SEO". You won't get results as fast as black hat SEO, but you will sleep a lot better.
Age: There is lot of evidence to believe that Google gives weight to the "age" of a website, and the magic figure seems to b 3 years. So you will a quantum jump in the performance of your website after it has crossed that magic figure. So until then, keep working hard.
Page loading speed: Google recently announced that it has started tracking the speed with which your website loads, and there is no reason to believe that it won't use it as a factor while ranking websites. And it makes sense if you think about it. If your website doesn't load fast, the visitor will get frustrated and curse Google for showing the website very high in the search results, right? SO make sure that your website responds fast enough to your visitors. What that means is that you have to use graphics judiciously. Flash, which was once considered trendy and which differentiated good websites from the average ones, also come under the scanner.
Submit sitemap: And last but not the least, you have to submit the sitemap f your website to all the search engines. If you have a good and complete sitemap, search engines will crawl your websites much better. In the absence of it, they will crawl according to their whims and fancies, and you will never get the expected results.
So, if you take care of all the above 8 things, you are "doing SEO" of your website. If you have understood it thoroughly and have the confidence to do it yourself, go ahead by all means, but make sure that you type SEO in your favorite search engine, and read all the important resources that you can find. Because SEO is not as easy as it seems. Whether you like it or not, experience counts, and a "true" SEO expert is worth his/her weight in gold. But make sure to ask good questions before you finalize your "SEO company". Ask them to give you a list of websites they have done SEO for, the keywords for which they show up on the first page, and then verify it yourself. Choose your SEO company carefully, because bad SEO is like bad or incorrect medicine; it will definitely make your website sick, if not kill it completely.