SEO - Adopt It And They Will Come
By: John Vinson
SEO, it is the life blood of which most traffic will visit your site. Let’s face it, you’d have to be very lucky to purchase a domain that people are going to physically type into an address bar. Most of your traffic will be coming from people using a search engine, specifically Google. That’s why making your site is Search Engine Optimization/-ized (SEO) is the most important step when starting out.
So, how can you make sure that your site is SEO, and that it is showing up in search engines. Most of the steps to becoming SEO are quite simple, and only require a few steps. The most obvious, and one where you could go and stop reading is hiring a SEO firm.
If you’re trying to save money though, and want to take a crack at SEO yourself; I have some useful tips.
First, you want to make sure you have a relevant title, with plenty of keywords in it. Your title is text you see in the title bar, or the top bar on the top-left section of your browser. JQuindlen has a self title, with a simple description ‘Web Design Solutions’. You can make it longer than that, but I recommend that it not get all that complicated.
The second step of improving SEO on your site, is using ALT, and title tags for links, and images. When Google “indexes” a site, meaning they search the internet looking for sites that have relevant words on them. So, the more relevant words you can have apparent on your site will help your chances of your site being indexed higher on Google.
When it comes to getting a higher viewing from Google, another key step is improving your “Page Rank”. When someone types in a search into Google, they’ve said that there are over 200 factors that are used to show results. One of them that they specifically have mentioned before is ‘Page Rank’. This can be a really simple part of your optimization, or one of the hardest. Increasing your page rank is all about making sure your site is being linked to by other sites. If your site has a larger community, then you have a better shot at having people link to you. But at the same time if you have a large community, it’s harder to obtain a larger Page Rank. Your basically trying to become the biggest fish in the pond. The smaller the pond, the less likely someone will throw their hook in, but you stand a better chance of being caught. It all sounds very confusing, but in essence you want your site to be featured as much as possible.
SEO can be a tough problem to solve. Even the so called “experts” aren’t always successful. Google keeps a tight lid on their practices, so a lot of times you’ll have to use trial and error to find what works, and what won’t. Good Luck.
