How To Search Engine Optimize Your Website Before It's Too Late

By Sawyer Lunthmoreland


It's a jungle out there when it comes to rising up the ranks of the major search engines. Getting your site to show on even the 5th page of results requires a strong understanding of SEO principles and a determination to implement improvements. Here we'll go over a few of tricks to help you become king of the jungle.

To increase sales of your products from your website, hire a professional to create individualized product descriptions. Product descriptions can make or break a sale. The benefit you will gain from better product descriptions will more than outweigh the cost of hiring the writer to create them, and will also increase your search engine rankings.

Flash navigation might be pretty, but a search engine spider can't even see it. If you insist on having your navigation, or entire website, built in Flash, make sure you provide alternate HTML navigation somewhere on each page. Also, have HTML pages available so that the search engine can index them and give you a correct Page Rank.

Do not use 301 redirects on a page that no longer exists on your website. Instead, use a 401 Gone error page to indicate the page is well and truly gone from your website. A 301 redirect should only be used if the content has actually been moved to another page.

Be careful how often you use ALT and TITLE attributes on a page. If you have 14 images and very little text, the ALT and TITLE tags, full of keywords can appear to be overused and an attempt to game the system. Try to balance out, how often you use them against how much copy is on the actual page.

Feel free to use the meta keyword tag, but don't include too many words. Use only your top 3-5 phrases of 2-3 words each, and make sure those words are also repeated in your copy. The meta keyword tag has mostly depreciated, but there are still some search engines that make use of it.

After you've run through your website with all the automated tools, it's time to do some manual inspections as well. Install the browsers that are likely to view your website and check it out in each. View it on a Mac and a PC, a laptop and a mobile phone. Don't forget a tablet or two! Don't forget to try different screen resolutions, too. There's no point in driving traffic to your site if they can't see it as it's intended!

When you make changes, back up your website. This may seem like common sense, but only a very small percentage of webmasters actually back up their website to their own computer (or another server, depending on the size of the backup.) Backups fail, so relying on a single backup done by your host could be dangerous!

Double check that your pages don't appear to have duplicate content, even if they seem different to you. Run similar pages through a uniqueness calculator, and make sure they are get at least a 50% grade. Search engines will penalize you if they believe you are repetitively posting the same content on your website to attract traffic.

Check how many inbound links you have for all the major keywords for your website, and then ensure that the number is high for each. Focus on the top keywords which you believe are driving the highest number of turnover traffic to your website, then focus on the keywords that have the least number of links using them as anchor text.

Make sure that the sites you link to are of high quality. Search engines judge you not only on your inbound links, but also on your outbound links. If you're linking to spam sites, or sites that are considered less than page rank worthy, it could drag your rank down with it.

You aren't going to become king in a day but these tips are going to put you solidly on the way to becoming king of your keywords. Incorporate as many of these tips that you can to see your ranking start to soar. Keep in mind that the more popular your keywords, the harder your fight for status is going to be. Keep following these tips and keep learning new ones to rise above the rest of the field.




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