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Your guide to information on creating quality SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to improve your natural, organic traffic and page rank. SEO is important to have because it provides the natural and free traffic to your website while keeping your website in the higher ranks for keywords you want to rank for. IT Strategists offers comprehensive SEO services as well as consultations on technology solutions for businesses.
Be sure to check out the 33 things businesses must do for the best SEO.
The secret to SEO is successful implementation of keywords, metadescriptions, backlinks, and quality content. Organic or natural traffic is the free traffic that comes from search engines as a result of keywords for which your site ranks. There is a good general rule of them about keyword density: "If you can't read two sentences without reading the same keyword, you've overdone it." This rule of course should be taken on a case by case basis, but in general, if you have greater than a 7% keyword density, not only will your content begin to sound repetitive, it sounds like you are stuffing your content with keywords. It is even reasonable to go as far as to suggest not being concerned with having enough keywords used within the content, since it can become repetitive and sacrifice the overall quality of the content. Do you recognize that snippet of text under the title of your website on the search engine? That is the metadescription for your website and not only do users see it, but so do web crawlers for a lot of search engines. Not all search engines utilize the metadescriptions since in the past they have had a strong association with SPAM, but for the most part a 155 character limit (including spaces) metadescription is important to include for Google in particular. The metadescription should always be something coherent that a user would understand, since for the most part, it is the snippet text that the user reads before deciding to click on the link to your site from the search engine. Your meta and keywords can also have an effect on your SEM campaigns and if optimized correctly, can reduce the cost of search engine marketing. The metadescription and keywords are both entered from the html side and it is important to use ones that most describe the web page. Generic keywords are not always as helpful and usually less competitive (such as medicine or insurance). Having keywords that are relevant to the specific topic of your site are essential and should be unique to each page. Duplicate metadescriptions are especially not helpful to SEO. Helpful Tip: Use the word or words in your domain name for your keywords on your main page. You can also use known abbreviations associated with your domain name. For example NY as short for New York or Xmas as short for Christmas.
A backlink is a URL link inserted onto another website or blog that has a "DoFollow" status. A DoFollow website or blog means that if a web crawler from a search engine is crawling a website that has a link to your site, that the crawler should follow the link onto your website as well. Backlinks are a must for any webpage to be considered of value on a search engine, especially on the Google search engine. Not only do backlinks help to bring traffic, they help search engines such as Google and Yahoo determine the importance of a website in relation to the existing backlinks. Backlinks are so valuable in terms of traffic, that expired domains with existing backlinks tend to sell for a lot more at domain auctions since they are a good source of existing traffic. An important element to remember about outbound links on your own site (or backlinks on your site for other sites) is to remember to use them sparingly. Outbound links that are not set to "NoFollow" are telling search engines that the site being linked to is important in relation to your webpage and should be followed by the crawlers, which can also become a drain on your page rank. Setting a link to "NoFollow" status is easy and can be done through the HTML by including rel="nofollow" next to the href (or the link inside the HTML). Headertags are also a necessity to ensure that the search engines are able to easily recognize the key elements of your webpage once the site has been crawled. Original, quality content that is relevant to the topic of your website is essential for keeping both the search engines and end user happy. Having original content that makes sense, does not have repetitively, and is rich in helpful keywords and definitions helps to organize your topics while making it easier for both machine and mortal to recognize and decipher the information on your website. It is a widely known fact that it is more important to create content with the visitor in mind and not the search engine (but at the same time it is important to use the tools mentioned above to insure that search engines find the site useful as well). The organization of the content is also an important factor since it contributes to the usability of the website for the visitor. For optimal usability, a great resource for web designing with the user in mind is the book "Don't Make Me Think," by Steve Krug. Websites that implement SEO correctly benefit by having increased natural traffic, improved page rank, a higher position on search engines, and an overall better user experience for visitors to the website. |