First Steps to a Search Engine Optimized Website

If you own or are responsible for a website, more than likely you want people using it (also referred to as “traffic”). The process for creating, modifying or positioning a website to get traffic through search engine results is commonly called “SEO” or Search Engine Optimization.

Internet Marketing 101

I’m going to list a few first steps to optimizing your website that will help you begin the quest of getting traffic to your website through search engine results.

1. Make sure you have registered your domain name for more than two years. Search Engines want to know that your website is here to stay and not just some SPAM site that will be gone a year from now.
2. Create a list of keywords (e.g. words or phrases that a person would search for to find your website) and properly place them within the content and code of your website specific to each page. Here are the main areas to make sure your keywords exist:
   1. Readable content areas and main bodies of text.
   2. Title tag in the HTML (this tag is what shows the title at the top of the browser).
   3. Heading tags. These are the h1, h2, h3… HTML tags. Many designers and developers make the mistake of either using images for their headings or just adding some style (CSS) to a span tag or another similar tag. This is a bad practice and doesn’t help you with SEO.
   4. Alt attribute of image tags (keywords in this area should describe each specific image).
3. Insure that your sites source code is “clean”. This means that the code is organized neatly and correctly so that the search engine “spiders” can crawl your links and find all of your sites pages. Also, making sure that the site validates with the WC3 is important and can help in this process. Pushing your website designer or developer to make this a priority can be critical to your sites success.
4. Build good quality back links to your site from other popular sites. Here is an article I found that has some very good suggestions an lots of detail. True You Marketing Blog

That should be short and sweet. If you would like more detailed information on the four (4) points above check out yet another article from True You Marketing Blog on How to Do Basic SEO for Any Website.