By Pascal Helou
New York, NY - SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing your website to gain maximum exposure and achieve high rankings in search engine results. There is no silver bullet to achieve this but rather a complex process that I will describe bellow. The idea is to optimize your website for the search terms that visitors will likely type in a search engine looking for your product or service. The more optimized and focused you are, the higher you will rate in the search results leading to increased traffic.
Step 1 - The first step is to baseline your current rankings by analyzing your current website rankings in all major search engines:
o Google PR - Google PageRank
o Google Index - Number of indexed pages
o Google link - Number of links
o Google cachedate - Date of current Google cache.
o Yahoo Index - Number of indexed pages
o Yahoo link - Number of links, pointing to the current page
o Yahoo Linkdomain (LD) - Number of links, pointing to the current domain
o Yahoo Directory - Domain presence in the Yahoo Directory
o MSN Index - Number of indexed pages
o MSN link - Number of links, pointing to the current page
o MSN Linkdomain (LD) - Number of links, pointed to the current domain
o DMOZ Directory - Domain presence in the Dmoz Directory
o Alexa Rank - Traffic estimation index
o Del.icio.us index - Link to del.icio.us history for current url
o Digg index - Link to Digg history for current url
o Check robots.txt - Check if robots.txt file exists and if it does show link to it
o Sitemap – Presence of a sitemap
o SEOdigger - Detecting search keywords for which a site is ranked high
o DMOZ – Domain presence in the Dmoz Directory
o Alexa Rank – Traffic estimation index
o Internal Links – Internal website links
o External Links – Links to external websites
Step 2 - Perform a complete analysis of your site:
o Validate the home page and all landing pages’ code and text.
o Note any changes that are required to make the pages more easily crawled or spidered.
o Identify all broken links or missing images.
o Check for any problems or errors on your web server.
Step 3 - Develop a list of keywords that people would type in a search engine to find you. These key words should be relevant to your site, your business, your industry and if possible your local area. The targeted keyword phrases list should be at about 20 words or phrases. Narrow the list down to a few based on how relevant they are, how popular and how strong the competition is for those words. Use the following top tools Trellian Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker, Google Adwords Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Search Tool to create your keywords.
Step 4 - Review your website content and modify your content to include key words from Step 3.
Step 5 – Publishing articles is a great way to drive traffic to your website. I don’t call them press releases because they are not. They are more like short white papers like this paper to address an issue. A great place to release such papers is ezinearticles.com and free-press-release.com. Do your press releases at prweb.com. There are many more release options. I just listed the ones I like. You should publish at least 10 articles on topics that relate to your site. Search Google for the paper titles you published and see how many websites have picked up on your papers.
Step 6 - Optimize the website for the following:
o Creation of Title Tags based on initial keyword research
o Description Tags
o Keyword Tags
o Alt Tags
o Comment Tags
o Robots.txt file
o Meta tags optimization including title, description and keywords
o Image Optimization
o On page Optimization
o Key phrases Optimization
o W3c Validations for Home page
o Comprehensive log file analysis
o Creation of a search engine friendly sitemap for better crawling of your site
o Create and optimize landing pages
Step 7 – Blogs are a great way to keep search engine spiders visiting frequently. Search engines like fresh and unique content. So keep the blog interesting, with daily updates and watch your ratings increase.
Step 8 - Create a competitive analysis once you have cleaned up your website structure, design and text. Search for your competition by using the search terms you selected in Google and take note the search results. Keep track of their ranking progress, what search words they have optimized for, the amount of traffic they receive and the inbound links.
Step 9 - Submit your website to all major search engines.
Step 10 - Open an account at google.com and upload your sitemap.xml to google.com/webmaster tools.
Step 11 - Get the code from google.com/analytics and imbed that code into your website to be able to track users coming to your site.
Step 12 - Review your website internal and external links. Make sure your internal links point the most to your most relevant page or your landing page. This will tell Google that this is your most important page.
Step 13 - Create a Link Exchange program to try to get as many high ranking links pointing back to your website.
Step 14 - Review your rankings as in Step1, competitive analysis as in Step 8 and review how successful your keyword selection has been based on the generated traffic.
Step 15 - Try different key word combinations to focus on if the current selection is generating very little traffic. Adjust your website text to reflect the new key word combinations.
Summary
Keep refining the process in Step 15 till you achieve the traffic you desire. Just remember, this is a time consuming and iterative process so give yourself plenty of time to get the rankings you are looking for.