SEO RESOURCES & TIPS

Search Engine Optimization involves designing a web site so that search engines can easily find the pages and index them. The objective of SEO is to have your page(s) appear within the top 10 results of a search. Optimization includes the selection of keywords to be used within the web page content and placement of these keywords within hidden Meta tags.

Below are 10 tips to that will help in optimizing a website.

1. META tags are HTML Tags that describe the contents of a web page. Search engines use these tags to index your pages. Each page should have Meta tags that define that page as well as the website itself. The most important meta tags that must be defined are: title, description & keywords. Using a simple Meta tag generator is the easiest way to create Meta tags.
   
2. Keyword density analysis & optimization - Keep your keyword density between 3-5%.
   
3. Title & Alt tags – adding keywords to title tags for links and alt tags for images is a positive SEO measure. For example [Links]title=”Search Engine Optimization”> [Images] alt=”SEO Resources”>
   
4. Directory Submissions – Submitting your website to web directories such as DMOZ, google, Yahoo and others that are highly ranked greatly enhances the SEO process. Search engines constantly index these directories and use this information to generate search results. Make sure you submit to the appropriate category in any directory.
   
5. Search Engine & Directory Submission – Submitting your website to all the major search engines is usually the first step after launching your website, this step notifies the search engines that your website exists. Constant submission to the search engines makes sure that the search engines always come back to index your fresh content. Submitting to major directories also aids the SEO process.
   
6. Link Exchange - Establish a link exchange partnership with other websites related to your industry. Include their links and request for a reciprocal link on their site as well. Link exchange is critical in building your page rank especially if the linking page has a high page rank
   
7. Site maps – Create a site map page that contains links to all areas on your website. XML sitemaps for yahoo and google are also an added advantage.
   
8. Web site validation – Ensure that your website has valid html with no errors and that content is not JavaScript generated as search engines cannot read javascript.
   
9. Site Structure and content – Content relevancy also plays an important role in SEO. Make sure your page is relevant by adding content pertaining to the business or what you do or offer. Making certain keywords within the content bold greatly increases their importance and relevancy of the page. Use minimal flash for the content since search engines can read Flash content. Use traditional links instead of javascript links. Place content you want to rank well near the top of the page.
   
10. Robots.txt – Add a robots.txt file to tell the search engines what to index and what not to.