Five Excellent Ways to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
Hopefully, you've already thoroughly warmed up your website makeover by running through our article on Keyword Optimization. If not, it might be wise to return to the homepage and peruse that article. It functions as an excellent primer for this piece that will focus specifically on tailoring your Web page, and its keywords, to turn on the Web's most popular search engines in a major way.
1. You Need a Watchful Eye.
No matter how ideally you have primped and groomed your Web page for the engines, your efforts will result to no avail if you do not carefully monitor your site's standing in the perspective of Yahoo and the like. The Web offers such helpful systems as PageRank, which (unsurprisingly) will assess the ranking of your web site in comparison.
How to determine if your site is doing well? For starters, PageRank operates on a scale of 1 to 10. Verify Google.com's standing (you've heard of that site, right?), and you will see it earns a full 10 out of 10. Bottom line: The higher your page's PageRank result, the more vibrantly and actively it is appearing on such sites as, well, Google.com.
2. Bring it On Back to You.
What better scheme to reinforce the essentialness, fun, and appeal of your own site than with a dash of Web incest? That's right -- the skill of artfully including links back to your very own Web page can spell easily earned dividends for your site's searchability. Should your site be old enough to have developed a few archive pages, do yourself a favor and slide links to those pages into your site.
Established blogs can accomplish this easily: At the end of every post, think of the best three or four relevant previous posts, and lodge a few links to them at the end of the article. Don't forget to be tactful -- few visitors will appreciate an overdose of inbred linking.
3. Map it Out to Build it Up.
Your webpage is so prolific and well-attended that it boasts scores of webpages, links, and titles galore. Such a healthy supply of Web presence is an obvious gift, but can ultimately curse you when not harnesses correctly. As in any venture, organization is key. Add a jolt of connective fiber and structure to your webpages with a site map -- that both you and visitors can quickly find and locate on every page. Requiring one or two clicks to find a given page on your site, instead of two, is not only appreciated by people clicking around on your site. Search engines also find site maps an easy way to determine pages to direct Web searchers to.
4. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words -- Pick One.
Beautifully shot and incorporated images are a sign of a professional website. Bravo to you if your site has excellent photos aplenty. But be sure to avail yourself of those images' potential to boost the website's search engine appearances. Think of the best word, or two or three, that encapsulate both the image and its reasons for being on the website. Then harness those words to bejewel your images with "alt" tags.
Search engines regard "alt" tags as a kind of computer catnip; they gravitate toward them, and will even entice people with text-only browsers to check them out. Plus (a bonus to those of you who have read our keyword optimization article): it's a nifty way to include even more helpful keywords onto your site, in a respectable way.
5. Tweet Me, Like Me, Be Aware and Share Me.
No excuses here -- every page on your website should have bountiful links to social networking sites. The Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr effect is obvious to us now; the more a given page, article, or link is shared on these sites, the more the Web is aware of your website's presence. Sharethrough can possibly assist you here.