There are lots of ways to get your website seen. You can pay for advertising, use your website address on printed material, and on your business card, or pay for PPC using Google Adwords or any of the other hundreds of PPC engines.
But nothing can be more cost effective than SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Marketing and it really is an art form that takes a while to learn. You see the search engine algorithims change quite often. Which means the rules change. And when the rules change (even though they don’t tell you they have change OR what they have changed to) you have to work on your site to try and get it higher on the search engines.
The payoff is FREE advertising that is going to help you company get more business. You can’t beat FREE.
Press8 Top 10 SEO Tips
1. Make your keyword text BOLD and use HEADERS.
This means make text BOLD or specify text as a HEADER on your site when it contains the keywords you are trying to capture.
2. Links coming to your site.
First of all, I wouldn’t recommend paying for links. Try and get others to link to your site. Easier said that done I know. But, say you become a member of a website. They say they will put a link to your site on their site. Ask them to use your keywords in the title of the link (called the title text). Links that use your keywords are the most valuable. Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation – something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.
3. Deep Linking.
Have the links going to multiple pages on your site. That tells the search engine that you have worthwhile content throughout your site and not just the home page.
4. Social bookmarketing.
You really must have a facebook, linkedin, & twitter accounts for your business. Make it easy for your visitors to social bookmark your website, creating important links that the search engines value. There are plenty of free social bookmarking widgets available.
5. Youtube videos.
Google owns Youtube now and is ranking pages higher if they have a Youtube video on it. No brainer.
6. Write articles and submit them to ezine publishers that archive their ezines.
The links stay live often for many years in their archives.
7. Be sure all your images have ‘alt tags’ with your keywords in them.
Don’t over do it though. Use different versions so it doesn’t look like you are Spamming the search engines. For example on some images put ‘bicycle pumps’ and on others put ‘bike accessories’.
8. Try to have text on your home page and your keywords as close to the top as you can.
First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page Multiple domains.
9. Always have a Site Map.
This helps search engine crawlers find all the pages on your site. And be sure to update your site map when you add new pages, write in your blog etc.
10. Keep a blog on your site and add to it frequently.
Search engines like new content and the easiest way to do this is to write in a blog. Be sure your sitemap has each of your blog entries on it. Add to your blog at least every week.
Conclusion
These are simple rules that will help you. We all know the ‘good content’ rule, so I didn’t add it. Of course you want to have good relevant content, no broken links (big no-no), and a a decent amount of text (not too much flash because the search engines can’t read it).
Happy SEO-ing!!
