It is time to BECOME VISIBLE!

As a business owner when you decide to go online and have your website developed, search engine optimization is one of the last thing that comes into the mind. But website development is not just about designing a site & making it live on the internet, you want the website to bring in business for you and work as a place to showcase your products and services. This is where SEO comes into picture, properly SEO optimized website design and development can go a long way in promoting your business & online presence.

Here are some of the important aspects of website development:

1.    Using appropriate heading & bold tags: Web developers while creating the site should properly use heading as well as bold tags at important places to emphasis important sections of text to search engines.

2.    Image optimization: Search engines such as Google and Yahoo cannot read text which is written in an image. To let search engines what the image is about you need to add correct ALT text for the image and help with better visibility of your images in search results.

3.    Canonical URLs: It would be hard to believe but search engines treat site.com, www.site.com & www.site.com/index.htm as 3 different pages, creating duplicate content issues for you. Solution to this is to do a 301 permanent redirection of the URLs to URL with www, i.e., www.site.com.

4.    Session IDs in PHP based websites: In PHP sites, unique PHPSESSID variable gets added to URL’s end in case cookies are not available and looks like this: PHPSESSID=24487890. This creates problems for your site in search engines as every time a webpage is visited they see a unique session id in the URL & think of the page as a different page, thus creating duplicate content problems for you. As a solution to this is to use url_rewriter.tags.

5.    External files for JavaScript & CSS: Nowadays all sites use CSS & JavaScript; if you put all the code on the page itself then it will increase the page size as well as page’s load time, thereby affecting how search engines rank your site. The solution to this is to put the code in external files and include a reference to them on the page.

6.    Page Titles and Meta Description: It is of vital importance in website design and development to make certain all the pages on the site have unique Meta description and page titles.

If you want to understand how search engines interact with your site and find potential issues before they impact your traffic, you need to verify your site and sitemaps with the three key search engines — Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You also must monitor your statistics regularly.

Register your website with Google Webmaster Tools. Create an account and verify your site by uploading a small piece of code to your server for Google to find. Then create an XML sitemap of all your site pages and upload it by using your Webmaster Tools account. Once you have completed this process, you will be able to check the following:

1.    How many pages Google has indexed and how often

2.    What errors Googlebot found while indexing

3.    What keywords are helping users find your pages

4.    How many incoming links each page has from external sources

5.    How many internal links each page has from other pages on your site

6.    How well your site is optimized for target keywords

7.    How fast your site loads

8.    How many broken links are on your site, where they point to, and on what pages.

There is a similar registration process with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools.

One of the biggest mistakes online businesses make with SEO is targeting the wrong keywords.

You should create a list of keywords. Include all the keywords and phrases you believe your potential customers might type into a search engine to find products and services like the ones you provide. Think to yourself, “What would I type into a search engine if I wanted to find a site like mine?” Try and come up with at least 50 keywords/phrases. Once you have your list enter it into an online keyword research tool such as WordTracker or the Google Keyword Tool. These tools show you how many searches each keyword/phrase receives daily. Do not consider keywords that generate less than 20 searches per day. Take the most popular keywords in your list and select the ones that relate specifically to your site content.

For a search engine to find a site relevant, it has to find the keyword within the visible text on your pages and in link text pointing to your site. So, placing your keywords into your Meta tags is not sufficient for Google to find your site a relevant match for related search queries.

You will need to rewrite your content to incorporate your keywords into your pages. Do not repeat a keyword phrase more than 3 or 4 times in a single page. Rewrite your page titles and META tags, alt tags and headings to include your new keywords. Also remember, every page on your site should have a different Title and META Description tag, tailored to the content of each page.

Install Google Analytics on your site. If not, then do it today. Google Analytics is a free site statistics package that provides insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. The program allows you to see and analyze your traffic data in new ways and you can learn how your visitors interact with your website.

Fresh content keeps a search engine coming back to your site. By adding new pages and information to your website on a regular basis, you are sending a signal to search engines and visitors that you have a great deal to provide, and they need to come back regularly. If you have more content you are providing your visitors more ways to find you in search engines.

The way you link between your own site pages can have a huge impact on the search rank of those pages. This is because Google and other search engines are influenced by the keywords that are used in the links themselves.

Looking for assistance with SEO? Contact us and speak with a specialist – mention this email and receive 25% off your SEO Plan. Become Visible Today!

*Did You Know– A recent study showed that Fortune 500 companies spend $51 million per day in aggregate on 88,792 keywords, and only 20.82% rank in the top 100 of natural search result. This means that 80% of the $51 million a day or $40 million per day is completely wasted.