If you have a website, you know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You may not actually know what it is or what it involves, but you’ve been told it’s the gateway to being found on the World Wide Web. SEO is indeed critically important if you want to be found on the Internet. If done properly, it will introduce you to people far and wide who are searching for what you have to offer.

What follows are three important SEO activities you can do on your own or outsource depending on your interest, availability, and inclination. These tips merely scratch the surface of SEO. At a deeper level it’s an art that requires an attention to detail, commitment, and creativity. However, you can improve your web rankings in the eyes of the search engines by taking these simple steps.

1. Submit Your Site to Search Engines

In technical terms they call this process XML Sitemap submission, and it is the best way of being sure search engines have information about your entire website. The bottom line is that search engines cannot rank you if they don’t know you exist! If you do not submit your site to the search engines then you are at the mercy of when they choose to crawl your site, which could be months or even years at a time. You can take control of this process by submitting your site on a regular basis or hiring someone to do this for you.

You can go to this link (http://www.squidoo.com/sitemap-submission) for some good information about how to submit your website on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com.

 

2. Generate Links for Your Website

One of the most important elements that Google considers when ranking your site is the number and quality of links pointing to it. The general idea is that the more sites indicating that your content is valuable by linking to it, the better. As long as these links come from sites deemed to be of quality or authority (meaning a high search rank), the better your own search rank will be. You can begin to accomplish this by submitting to certain directories, or doing a link exchange with friends, colleagues, and organizations. Another effective way to build links is through social networking channels (e.g., facebook, Twitter, Blogs of interest). Being a part of online discussions is an excellent way to build links back to your website.

By far the best way to get quality links to your site is by writing good content. If it’s original, informative and interesting people will want to link to it. For instance, suppose Nancy writes a blog entry on her site that John finds interesting. John then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about your post, linking back to Alice’s original post. This is the essence of the term Backlink that receives so much buzz in the SEO world nowadays.

3. Use Your Tags!

For our purposes, there are three tags you should be aware of if you have a website Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Descriptive Tags. Tags are basic units of web code that have a significant impact on your search ranking by giving you the ability to define and describe your website to search engines. They are a critical piece of real estate on your site that is often underutilized or outright neglected.

What are these Tags exactly?

Title Tags

Title tags are available on each page of your web site, and they give you the ability to identify your web page. For example, a title tag for a web page on a counseling site might look like this.

David P. Diana Counseling for Career Transitions in Charleston

Google will display up to 66 characters of a title tag. The title is displayed in the search results as the most prominent piece of information available to searchers.

 

Meta Tags

Meta Tags are keywords entered into the header of a web page, but unlike Title Tags, they are not seen by web viewers. Their main purpose is providing additional descriptive data for search engines.

 

Meta Description Tags

The Meta Description Tag is the second most important tag next to Title Tags, since search engines frequently use it as the description for your page’s listing. A well written description tag increases the chance that your search listing will be clicked on.

 

There are many other ways to improve your search ranking! Pay attention to these three as a starting point and feel free to email us at nicole@davidpdiana.com to learn about our SEO services to get your site ranking (and stay ranking).

 

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