Search Engine Optimization Plays an Essential Role in Getting your Web site Found Online

Here are a few DIY SEO tips that can help boost your website's search engine indexing and page ranking:

1. Research your Website Keywords and Keyphrases

This is the foundation of your website to Search Engines. Use several of the available Keyword Research tools to find out how visitors search for your products or services. Some of the best searches are niche oriented and localized for your neighborhood, city and region. Use SEO tools to pick out the best terms for your business. Based on the volume of traffic they typically have for searches, choose a few keyphrases for each page, and optimize for those phrases. Choose phrases with good volume of search traffic, but not as competitive as generic and broad terms. Be specific.

2. CONTENT!!! Search Engines Look for Original Content

If you only do one thing for SEO on your site, do this:  add as much new content as frequently and consistently as you can.  Adding fresh and original content is one of the most important parts of optimizing your web site for the search engines.  Articles, images, press releases, calendar events, newsletters, new web pages - it all counts!

When adding fresh content to your website, make sure you are including your targeted keywords within your text.  Use Schipul's Keyword Analyzer Tool to take a peek at your keyword scoring and adjust accordingly. Make pages that are for users, not search engines.

3. Optimize your Website's Titles, Meta and Alt Tag Info

Incorporate your chosen keywords into your site's Title Tags, Headings, body text, text links, image ALT tags, and META tags. Don't keyword stuff your content with too many uses of the same phrase, but it should be clear what the site is about by scanning the pages. Set a goal of using targeted keyphrases on each page to tell both Search Engines and visitors exactly what is the topic of the page.

4. Link Architecture and Cross-linking for Optimization

Provide good navigation, anchor links, and links from companies and business related to yours.

• Cross-link your pages to each other with relevant keyphrases as the iinks to provide contextual relevance. Every page on your site should be reachable from at least one static text link so it can be included in the search engine indexes.
• If you belong to an association or Chamber of Commerce, request a link to your site and make sure you have a Local business listing in Google Places and Bing Local with correct address and contact info. Check out the Optimizing Google Places SEM blogpost for more information on creating and optimizing your listing.

Don't participate in link schemes to try and increase your ranking. Make sure links to and from your site are relevant and related to your content or locality. Use common sense and avoid web spammers who make too good to be true offers to exchange links.

5. SiteMaps for People and Search Engines

Include a Sitemap in an xml or web friendly format to let the Search Engines index your site properly. In simplest terms, it is a list of the pages on your website. This lets the search engines easily know what pages are on your site, their relative importance to each other, and archives of content that may not be well linked.

For other helpful DIY SEO tips, follow Schipul's Search Engine Marketing Blog. You can also find us on Twitter at @semblog.

We at the Schipul SEM Team are here to help navigate the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). To learn more, call (281) 497-6567 or contact Schipul via email.