10 Steps to SEO Your Website

Note that this article assumes that your website has not been optimized yet. If you have already been actively optimizing your website, you’ve probably done these things already.

1. First, you should think about what keywords you want to optimize your site for. With no clear goal, you won’t be able to optimize your site. Be realistic too. If you are optimizing you site for a major keyword like health care, then it may be a long long time before your reach the top 10 for health care.

2. Next, check the content written on the page and make sure to use the keywords you are trying to optimize for. Don’t overdo it, as you will get penalized. Simply use the keywords where they are appropriate.

3. Third, check the titles of your pages and make sure it is rich in keywords that pertain to the page. For example, if the page in question is about how to grow magnolias, then label the page “Growing Magnolias”. Easy. The title is located in between the <title> tags.

4. Check all of your images and add alt tags in them to provide information about the images. An image with a picture of a printer would be labeled “printer”. Alt tags are commonly used in this format:

<img alt=”printer” src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/printer.jpg”>

5. Check your meta tags and ensure that they contain relevant information. Although meta tags have less importance nowadays, they are still used by many search engines and all search engines still read meta data.

6. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap to Google. To ensure that new pages will always be indexed by Google, you may wish to submit your updated sitemap everytime you create a new page. Google Webmaster Tools also has a variety of site analysis features that provide good statistics and input on how you can improve your website.

7. Make sure all of your pages are navigable by spiders and people with older browsers. This requires you to make sure that all sites have a link to them via html even if you insist on mantaining javascript menus. Javascript menus or Flash links can’t be accessed by all spiders. Some seem to be able to read Javascript link, but javascript, ajax, and other languages don’t have full readability by spiders.

8. Build links to your site. One-way links are better, but reciprocal links have their place as well. Remember the adage “quality over quantity”. This applies to SEO too. A link from an important site is far more valuable than a lot of links from sites with no traffic.

Initially, you can build links by submitting your website to different directories. Niche specific directories should not be overlooked. You can also publish articles on certain sites like Ezinearticles and if you have a great article, people will put it on their own website. If your site isn’t even listed in the search engines yet, you might want to submit your site to them.

Building links is a long term activity and the best way to build links in the end is to simply provide a helpful and useful website. If your site genuinely provides value to others, people will eventually link to you.

9. Ensure that your website is clean and attractive to users. Remember that although search engines can’t tell the difference between beautiful sites and ugly sites, they do pay attention to the popularity of your site. PEOPLE definitely know if a site is pretty or not and a visually attractive site tends to draw more visitors which draws the attention of search engines.

Note that attractive does not mean littered with graphics. Clean and easy on the eyes would be a good goal for visual design.

10. Keep adding more content! The more that is on your site, the more pages that are indexed and more reasons are created for people to go to your website. In addition, each page can rank high for their specific longtail keyword phrase and slowly build the importance of your website.