Critical Parts Of Optimizing A Website

It is said that there is no low priority aspect when it comes to optimizing a website, everything counts. You need everything done right, from keywords to linking and programming structure. All of those things affect the overall ranking of your website. Also, don’t forget the content! Therefore, let’s talk about the critical aspects of website optimization, the aspects that one should look into thoroughly.

The first thing you need to sort out is your website accessibility. There are a few key points you need to keep an eye on or the search engines may penalize your website. Start with basic things, like the link functionality. If you already have broken links, search engines may degrade your ranking, not to mention the people browsing your website. They will feel frustrated if the links they click on are not working.

After checking for broken links, you need to check the validity of your HTML and CSS. People may say that this is not an important part, but actually it is very important. If your website doesn’t follow some rules set by the W3C guidelines, search engines may crawl your site and find errors. They may misinterpret some of the things which will eventually affect your rankings.

You also need to maintain high functionality of your website. There is a saying in SEO, the simpler the better. Too many Java scripts, element block content and select boxes may cause search engines to miss some pages. Be sure to directly link the relevant pages on your website, since crawlers follow links.

Another thing to keep an eye on is the file size. Search bots, spiders, crawlers, call them what you like, have a limit. They can and will only index pages and their content up to 150K. They will index your page if it exceeds that amount, but they may not index it completely. This means that some of your most important content on a certain page will not be indexed. Not to mention that having files of a smaller size on your pages will also allow your pages to open faster. This helps the visitors greatly. You need to keep your site optimized, since both search engines and people will find hard to index or read a slow page.

Technical Aspects

The first part of technical aspects is, and always was, the URL. In addition to the URL, there are also title tags and meta data that are of importance. Those are all things that describe your website both to search engines and to visitors. Highly relevant URL and title tags can mean a lot for your website, especially if you use keywords. Combining an important keyword with the titles, URL, content and, of course meta data will lead to a high ranking eventually.

You should aim for the URL to be descriptive and relevant, and at the same time short. That can be hard, but there are a few things you should consider before deciding on a domain. For other pages URL can be modified, but it is much harder to modify a domain URL. You can choose one of the three forms of URL.

  • Keyword
  • Brand
  • Business name

Keyword is probably the best option of all, but almost every word in the dictionary is already taken, so that may be difficult. Brand name is something like Digg or Amazon, that is also good but you need to work hard in order to promote a brand name. Business name is for those that already have a store and wish to open a website for their products and clients. This means that you can have both keyword and brand in your URL.

Title tags are also very important. The best idea is to have a keyword in the title, but at the same time to make it full of information. If you are writing about the new iPad, using just that name will get you nowhere. The best example for a good title would be: “iPad – A new gadget from Apple”. Doing that you provide both visitors and search engines with what they need, information.

Meta tags are the last part. Some time ago, meta tags were the only thing we needed in order to make a website rank high. You just needed to stuff your meta tags with keywords and you can place yourself in top rankings. That is not the case now. Actually, it isn’t the case for over 10 years. Although meta tags will not be used to calculate your rankings they are used for description. Most search engines, like Google will use the snippet from your meta description tag and place it under the link. That description may have the biggest influence on someone to click on your link and visit your website.

Every single part mentioned in this article is very important for optimization of your website. We are not living in the 90’s when you could just stuff your meta with keywords and enjoy the number one rank. SEO has become very complicated, but if done properly it will show you its benefits.

The website optimization has some important key points that shouldn’t be overlooked when it comes to the search ranking.

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SEO Strategy

SEO is an ongoing process in which you try to get your website to rank high in the search engines. There are a few strategies that can be used, and each strategy has its benefits and its flaws. The best strategy would be to implement every good method that can be done, but that can sometimes consume an enormous amount of time and energy. The most important thing is to make sure that your website has good content. Having quality content on your website will make others want to link to you. On the other hand, there is no purpose in building a great site without optimizing it. What is the purpose of a great website if no one will see it?

If you expect quick results you are stepping into the wrong territory. SEO is a long process, both in its application and results. The most important thing is to be patient and apply SEO step by step.

As mentioned above, having unique content is essential. Your content and the proposal you are making to your visitors needs to be special, different from what has already been offered on the web. This is a hard task, but if you want to succeed, it is a must as well.

An online community is also something you must be a part of. Whether you will build your community or join some niche related community or do both doesn’t matter, as long as you are a part of a community.

Friendly linking is very important. No matter how great your content is, if it is not formatted well or if it has a lot of ads breaking the content nobody will link to your website. Therefore, concentrate on building links and placing some ads that will promote your website. Other things will come at a later date when you already have popularity. Make your website friendly and people will want to link to you.

Monetization plan is something you must have if you want to earn money from your website. If you don’t have a monetization plan sooner or later the costs for hosting and servers will start draining on your budget.

Market awareness is something every site owner needs too. There is no point in you creating a website if you are not aware of the competition. Competing for a high competitive keyword is sometimes impossible, so if you are still planning on going for that maybe you should concentrate on a marketing budget. That way you can buy links, or hire a consultant that will bring more high PR sites with links to your website.

What every SEO consultant will tell you when creating an SEO strategy for your website, is to focus on quality rather than quantity. Although quantity will bring you some PR, most likely very fast, in the long run it will be considered as spam and it won’t bring you a high rating. On the other hand a few well placed quality articles may be worth thousands of links pointing to your website. Stay focused on quality since one quality link from an .edu or .gov site will be worth over 30,000 links from a blog community that has a page rank 2 or 3.

The last part of building a website is deciding on whether to use the services of a professional SEO company or to go with your home based SEO. There are benefits and flaws of both. While working from home you will save money and you will learn a lot about SEO and online marketing. In the end you will have a complete control, which means that you will be responsible. Whether you will succeed or fail will be up to you, so it will come down to either death or glory, but it is yours and yours alone.

On the other hand, having a professional SEO consultant has great advantages. You will be placing your website into the hands of professionals that do SEO for living, which means that they have great knowledge and experience. Most of the SEO companies already have a good relationship with many high PR websites which can mean a lot in boosting to your ranking via links. They already have a great link building knowledge and they can easily identify linkable content. They will fix any problems your website might have and they will save you a lot of time.

The best thing to do is to acquire the knowledge needed, but still hire a SEO professional. By doing that you will cover every aspect needed. If you understand SEO you can be more involved and you can still have complete control. That way you will be responsible for the course of your website’s SEO, while the professional company will be doing most of the work. You will be able to rely on them for a quick and professional service that will bring high quality links to your website.

If you do hire SEO professionals to do the optimization for your website, you need to be mindful of some things. Never use a company that guarantees high ranking. A company that is promising high ranking in no time is most likely a company of spammers that use black hat SEO which can get you banned by the search engines. You also need to look for the optimization method that the company is planning to use. Keep in mind that you want your website to be friendly to both visitors and search engines. You will gain nothing if they optimize it just for your high rankings.

The SEO strategy has many important points one should look into before engaging into the website optimization process.

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SEO – Keyword Research

When we are talking about SEO most people will automatically think of keywords, and they are right. There are other aspects of SEO however, but keywords are the most important part. Just think about it, when you run a search what did you use in order to search for something? You used a keyword.

Therefore, the whole search engine optimization is based on keywords. If you want somebody to find you, you need to provide keywords for them to be able to do that. It is as simple as that, but what is not so simple is finding the right keywords. It can even be the hardest part sometimes. The first part of finding the right keywords is the keyword research.

Keyword research – How to

If you want to rank well, the keyword research is the most important part of SEO. Without proper keywords you might be placed low in the rankings or even worse, search engines may misinterpret your content and rank you for wrong keywords. There are a few steps you need to take in order to thoroughly research the keywords and their worth for your website.

The basic step is something that everybody will tell you, and it is something you have to do on your own – brainstorming. You need to look at your website content and figure out which words are most likely to be used in a search. Exploring those keywords is a must and to do that you can use keyword search tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool offers information on how much a certain search has been done in the past month or over the year and it will also give you some alternative keywords you can use. You can use similar tools to analyze the worth of those keywords as well.

The next step is analyzing the keyword terms. This is really an important step because it measures the level, quality, and quantity of search for that phrase. In order to measure a worth and significance of a keyword there are a few steps you need to take.

First is the conversion rate. Conversion rate is the percentage of people who search a certain phrase and actually buy a product or click on ads on your website. Second is the predicted traffic, a rough estimate of the people that will conduct a search on your keyword each month. Then there is customer value, which represents an average amount earned per customer that used the keyword you are targeting. The last, but very important is competition. Your competitors are very important and you need to measure how competitive is your keyword and will it be difficult to rank high.

When you analyze all of these elements you can find the right keyword to target. It is best to keep two or three keywords per page in the beginning. Having too many keywords may be contra productive. It is best to keep as many pages as possible with not too many keywords presented on those pages. Later on, when you are building links it will be easier to link your pages, i.e. content of each page and relevance. Do not stuff all the links on one page.

Long tail keywords

For all of you new in the business, a long tail keyword is a keyword phrase that consists of several words, in example: “where to buy a Stihl chainsaw”. I know what most of you are thinking, why use long tail when plain “Stihl chainsaw” will do the trick? There are two reasons for that.  First, it is much easier to rank high for a long tail keyword. Second, people that use long tail keywords to look for something are more likely to make a purchase. That shows that they know what they are looking for.

In this part you need to think harder in order to find specific long tail keywords related to your website. This is where you need human opinion and not just keyword tools. You need to target highly convertible keywords that are related to your niche. You can separate your niche into smaller groups that can help you find the proper long tail keyword you are looking for. You need to remember that long tail keywords are the key to monetization of a website. We already said that people who know what they are searching for are more likely to make a purchase.

In the end all of this is very important, and you can’t skip a single part of it if you want your keywords and your website to rank well. Proper keyword research is necessary. You need to find less competitive keywords that have high relevance but decent amount of traffic.

By doing the keyword research properly and by finding the right long tail keywords you will be able to optimize your site correctly and gain more visitors and potential buyers.

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