Search Engine Optimization – A Beginners’ Guide (part 1)

Posted by Phil on Dec 3, 2010 in Instructional / How-to, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | 0 comments

“How do I make my site show up in Google?” “How do I drive traffic to my website?”  “How do I increase my page rank?”  These are questions we get a lot and they all ask the same thing – how to get greater visibility in Google to draw more traffic to your website.   The two best ways to have your website displayed in Google search results are to purchase advertising through Google AdWords or to improve your site’s “organic” search ranking. “Organic” search ranking is how Google places your site within search results based on how relevant it is to a user’s search compared to similar sites.

We discussed Google AdWords in a previous article so this two-part article will focus on “Search Engine Optimization”.  Called “SEO” for short, Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing a website to improve its ranking in Google based on keyword searches relevant to your line of business. Good SEO engineers teach their customers best practices that include both technical implementation guidelines as well as a particular style of content creation.  A complete guide to SEO best practices would fill volumes but in this two-part article we’ll cover some simple techniques you can use to start moving your page rank upwards. First up? The technical side of SEO.  Please keep in mind that this blog is created for a non technical audience so we’ll avoid any techniques that involve more than minimal coding.  We’ve included as many links as possible to provide further explanation of each tip but if you’re unclear about something please leave a comment or write us.

SEO Technical Tips

• When considering an online identity for your business, strive for uniformity.  For example, avoid registering “Denton Solutions” on one service and “Denton Business Solutions” on another.  Before you begin registering accounts do some due diligence and make sure your desired profile name is available on all the major social media platforms (see below).
• Offer as many ways for your customers to reach you as possible.  Maintain as many online profiles and services as you can, including Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn,YouTube, blog directories such as Technorati, industry and local directories, etc.
• Create an XML Sitemap of your site and submit it to the major search engines including Yahoo! Site Explorer, Bing WebMaster Center, and especially Google WebMaster Tools.  This ensures the search engines “know about” each and every component of your site.  For help with this, read this Google article about how to create a Sitemap.
• Create an RSS feed to syndicate your content.  If your site uses a Content Management System (“CMS”) like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla there are plugins to do this for you; otherwise check out this guide.
• Link said RSS feed to FeedBurner.  This provides your readership lots more ways to get timely content updates from you.  Additionally, it allows you to automatically notify other social media outlets when you publish new content.
• Register your business for Google Places to ensure potential customers can find you when performing searches for a particular geography.  With Google’s integrated search results (web pages, images, videos and locations appear in one search) this could jump you way ahead of more well-established competition.  Paid Tags on Google Places can quickly identify your business to potential customers.
• Create unique HTML page Title and Description meta tags for each page of your website.  This is an opportunity to tell Google and potential readers what the page is about.  Google may use these fields as the title and description that are actually displayed in search results.  Don’t worry too much about the “keywords” meta tag as Google doesn’t use it for page ranking.
• Use meaningful webpage URLs (filenames).  For example, rather than naming the files in your webpage “page1.html” and “page2.html” try “About-My-Company.html” or “Products-and-Services.html”.  Google is smart enough to “read” page names so make them something descriptive!
• Build “back links” to your site.  In other words, find websites that will place a link to your site somewhere on their site.  Often times you may need to offer a “link exchange”, where you both link your sites to each other.  Good places to start looking for link exchanges are professional societies, chambers of commerce, or local/community-based websites.  Other large business directories you can list your business in include Yelp, CitySearch, YellowPages, or MerchantCircle.
• Lastly, sign up for Google Analytics.  It will provide you with amazing insight into the people visiting your site, where they live, how they found your site, and more.

And that covers our top ten technical tips for optimizing your site for better search engine results. Keep in mind that these changes will not rocket your site to the top of Google searches overnight but with some diligence you should see some improvement in your site’s search rankings in just a couple months. If you have any questions or think we’ve left something out feel free to contact us or just leave a comment below. Thanks for reading and keep an eye out for Part 2, where we’ll discuss optimizing your site’s content for Search Engine Optimization!