by Ran Nir
S
earch engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume of traffic to a site from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and Bing via unpaid search results. Fundamentally, the higher your site is ranking for a particular search term, the more traffic you’ll get. Therefore your goal is to increase your ranking within the search engine guidelines as it will directly influence your revenue.
1. Save On the Site’s Development – Whether you will own your SEO work or hire a 3rd party agency to manage it, optimizing your site will cost you time and money. You should also bear in mind that in all likelihood the first version of your site won’t always hit the nail on the head so consider launching with the absolute basic of features in order to keep a decent budget for marketing and later on for site tweaks.
2. Don’t Save on Hosting – While saving on the initial development cost is important, investing in quality and reliable hosting is as important in my view. Ensuring your website loads quickly is crucial for your optimization success and for user experience. Dedicated hosting packages (unlike shared hosting packages) will ensure that your site’s performance isn’t depended on other sites on the server, your IP address is likely to be fixed (you could also buy a fixed IP address separately) and due to the quick loading time the engines will find all your pages in working order when crawling your site.
3. Get the Domain Name Right – Buying the right domain name is one of the most important decisions you’ll need to make at the very start. While there are many tips and tricks for buying the right domain, I would suggest buying a descriptive name which unlike a generic name can make life just a little easier when optimizing the site. An example for a descriptive name will be CoolMarketingStuff.com, while Google is an example of a generic domain name.
4. List the Keywords You’d Like to Rank for – Normally optimizing your site means shortlisting the keywords which you’d like to rank for and optimizing your site around those keywords. You should pick the keywords which describe your product or service and most importantly pick the keywords which are likely to convert well for the business. For example, if you are selling mobile phone covers and you know that unlike your competitors you’re not competitive when it comes to leather covers, but you are when it comes to plastic covers, optimize your site around the second term.
5. Use the Metadata Tags Correctly – Once you have shortlisted your keywords you would need to insert them into your pages using the metadata tag location. Each page should really be optimized around one key term. To optimize your site for Google, limit the page title (also known as window title) to 70 characters and the page description to 140 characters. Once you’ve added or updated the metadata, use a preview tool to ensure you haven’t exceeded the number of characters and that it reads well. Here’s how the metadata comes into view when users search for a specific term:
This has been a guest post by by Ran, marketing manager of Photo Paper Direct.
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