Basic search engine optimization items - SEO Process part 1 continuation

The following are the basic search engine optimization items I almost forgot to discuss on my previous blog, so let's continue:

1. HTML Title tags
2. Meta description and keyword tags on every page of the website
3. Use of keywords; density, proximity, frequency
4. Website content
5. Website Theme
6. Site popularity
7. The website URL containing keywords
8. The file names in the site containing keywords
9. Using Alt tags on images
10. Using link popularity strategies
11. Website Design
12. Portal pages
13. Paid Inclusion or the length of time it takes to get listed in search engines
14. Analyzing competition
15. Avoid things that search engines penalize you for

The Title tag of a webpage describes the page in one sentence. The title is the first thing that a search engine spider sees. It also is what appears as the webpage description in the search engine's results. Every search engine places importance on the title tag. Some search engines consider the title to be the most important part of your webpage.

Meta description tags describe your site's content to a search engine by using keywords. The tag is added to the HTML code of each webpage. Searchers cannot see the Meta description tag when they look at your page.

The Meta keyword tag is a list of keywords. It tells search engines all the keywords that you would like to have your site listed for. Like the Meta description tag it is added to the HTML code of each webpage and searchers cannot see it when they look at your web page.

Your website content is important in rankings. Most search engines rank websites by the quality of their content. Your website should be more than a marketing message, it is an opportunity to relate with and engage your consumer. Good content does this. More importantly, every search engine wants to see the same thing, a web site that is filled with great, useful content. All search engines base their ranking algorithms on this. If your site uses your relevant keywords naturally within simple guidelines you will rank higher in search engine results. If you do not have a lot of useful content in your site or keyword phrases that are used naturally within the text, you do not have all of the essential elements of a good website. Once a website has generated traffic, the design and content on the site must convert the traffic to sales.

Themes: Search engines have begun to rank sites by theme. A website's theme is the common subject matter throughout the site. Search engines algorithms rank websites on their theme to provide searchers with more relevant information. This provides search results that are more relevant to the subject matter searched for. To determine themes website algorithms analyse all website page's titles, meta tags, text, and links. 

Site popularity is determined by click popularity and stickiness. Click popularity is the number of clicks a website receives from a search engine. When your website receives more clicks for a particular keyword a search engine determines that your site is more relevant for those keywords and ranks it higher for them in the next search. Stickiness is the amount of time that the searcher stays on your site, the longer the searcher stays the better.




Having the website URL contain keywords boosts search engine rankings for those particular keywords i.e. seo-linkbuilder-philippines.com/ would rank higher on searches for search engine optimization. 

ALT tags are descriptions or labels of images. Search engines cannot tell what text is contained in an image. The ALT tag tells the search engine what the image is. These tags can also include keywords to increase their frequency in the page. 

Link popularity is measured by the following three factors; number of links, link relevance, and link text. The more links you have on your site the better. If the links provided are relevant to your site the optimization benefit is greater. Relevant links can be from anyone else in the same search engine category, i.e. competition, suppliers, or sites providing information on your industry. Link text is the description of the link provided that people see to click on i.e. search engine optimization may be the link text someone sees; when they click on it the link may take them to PageRankers.com. Using keywords to describe links also provides a greater benefit. Link popularity tells search engines that your website is valuable and that it should be ranked higher.

Flashy sites with special graphics may look good, but search engines may not recognize quality content in flash website designs. Search engines have a difficult time indexing websites that use flash, framing, dynamic content, large graphics, and multimedia files, if they are able to index them at all. In these cases portal pages for optimization are highly recommended. An expensive website that has a great appearance may be useless to your business if no one can find it. A website that is optimized correctly not only is designed to rank high in search engines, but offer functional and relevant content for converting web traffic to revenue.

The design of the website should allow the site to load fast. The site should be well organized and easy to navigate.

Portal pages are web pages that are specially optimized for specific keywords. These pages are used to get higher website search engine rankings. The pages are usually separate from the main website and act as a path directing traffic to the main website. Portal pages allow websites to achieve higher rankings for many competitive keywords. The pages can be tailored to specific keywords and specific search engines. Portal pages are essential for websites that contain frames, dynamic content, large graphics, or multimedia files. Because these types of pages are used mainly to draw traffic, they should not be submitted to directories.

Paid inclusion is when a search engine or directory is paid to have all or some of the pages of a website submitted directly into the search engine or directory's database. This process ensures that everything submitted to the search engine or directory will be indexed. Doing this gives you more control over how the submissions are categorized and indexed. This gives you the ability to generate more traffic immediately by allowing you to more quickly match searches. It also eliminates the time that it would take for a search engine's spiders to index your site out of the over three and half billion estimated pages on the web. Paid inclusion is important for sites that use framing, dynamic content, large graphics, and multimedia files.

It is crucial to analyze the competition for particular keywords. SEO experts use many methods to analyze keyword and website competition. The HTML title, Meta tags, and keyword usage will be analyzed. There are techniques that can be used to make a search engine index and rank a different page. If a page ranks high there may be many reasons. SEO experts may use different methods to determine why web pages have a certain ranking. For example; Google has a feature that stores web pages indexed by their spider.