Search Engine Optimization SEO

As a Website Development and Internet Marketing Company, a major focus of ours when developing our client's websites is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the website's web pages. The first and foremost important thing for SEO is your website's Title Tags.

If a website does not have Title Tags that properly define its pages then it will be extremely difficult to receive a good ranking in the search engines. There are many reasons why Title Tags are so important - the following will define Title Tags and outline the importance of their use for Search Engine Optimization.

What is a Title Tag?

A Title Tag is a small piece of code that goes into the header of every web page. If you're familiar with the code of your pages, then the Title Tag are the words between the sections. Whatever is entered here will display on the top of the browser window when a user is viewing that page. This helps to let your viewers know what that page is all about.

A Title Tag is also utilized by the search engine. The search engine will take these words and use it when indexing the page in their search directory. These words will act as a hyperlink in the search results and will link the user to that particular page of the website.

If you do a search in Google for Professional Website Development what do you see? You see a listing of millions of pages all about "Professional Website Development". In the search results you will notice that the top listings all have those words highlighted and if you click the link you will be directed to that company's web page.

What is the Importance of Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization?

Because the search engines use the Title Tag to list the page in their search engine, this is what they use to understand the content that's on that page. If you have descriptive Title Tags for your various pages then you will have a better chance than if you just had generic Titles listed because you will be giving the search engines the topics for your various pages.

Let's take an example:

Let's say your homepage had a Title Tag like the following: . What benefit does that have for SEO? Absolutely none! No person will ever search for "Welcome to our Website" in the search engines because it is way too generic.

To the search engine this is invaluable information and would not help define what your company or that web page is all about.

How do you fix this?

It's really not that complicated. For example purposes, let's say your company is an Internet Marketing Company. Let's update our Title Tag to say . Now this has value! To the search engine this truly defines what your company is all about and what content is on your web page. If someone now does a search for "Internet Marketing and SEO Company" you have a better chance of being displayed in the search engine for that search.

One thing to remember is that when you are updating your Title Tags, it's important to update the Title Tag for every single website to ensure that they all relate to that content that's on that particular page. If all of your web page's Title Tags are the same, then the search engines will basically see this as one page. But if you have different Title Tags for every page, then the search engines will index your pages accordingly.

What are the next steps?

Here's what I recommend. I recommend first to define the various keywords and phrases that are important to your business. This will help you determine the keywords that should be listed in your Title Tags. After outlining your keywords, now spend the time going through the pages of your website and update the Title Tags for every page. When doing this, pay close attention to the content that's on that page. Make sure that the Title Tags properly reflex the page content. You do not want to improperly use keywords and phrases that do not correctly reflect the page content... this will not do you any good!

When doing this, ensure that the keywords you use in your Title Tags are also used in the content of that page. As you're going through, you may also want to update your page content to make sure you're properly using the keywords and phrases that you've outlined above. If you're updating your content during this process, this is a great sign. Updating your content to reflect your main keywords and Title Tags is one step closer to having a website that is properly optimized for the search engines.

Monitor your results

After doing this for every page of your website, it's now time to monitor your results and see if the changes you've made are successful. Give it some time because it takes some time for your pages to be indexed in the various search engines. There are ways to speed up the indexing process to a matter of days using an automated sitemap submission but if you do not use one of these methods then you must allow at least 2 months for the new content to become indexed.

Also check and monitor your website statistics. Check the traffic and monitor the keyword search terms that are now being searched. Are you noticing the new terms that you've updated in your Title Tags and content being searched? If so great! If not, then you need to re-evaluate your terms and make sure you're using terms that users looking for your type of company will type into the search engines.

If you effectively apply these steps to your Title Tags then I'm confident you will start to see an improvement in website traffic. This is just the tip of the iceberg for SEO but it's one of the first and most important things to do to optimize your web pages and let the search engines know what you're pages are all about.

At Hudson Horizons, we offer automated submission of your Sitemaps to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

Click to automate your Sitemap submissions.

Hudson Horizons http://www.hudsonhorizons.com is an e-business product, solution and marketing company specializing in creating highly sophisticated customized websites, web-based software applications and providing e-marketing services for small and mid-sized businesses.

Our vision and ultimate ambition as a company is to always strive to be "The New Light for e-Business."

By offering new, innovative and extremely competitive products and solutions to our clients, we provide better ways to run and operate their business online.

Search Engine Optimization. A lot of people are clamoring to know exactly what it is. SEO is the process of enhancing the presence and visibility of a website on search engine listings. Not only is it a process, it is about the tool required to make the enhancement happen. There are two main types of search engine optimization:

*On page Optimization

*Off Page Optimization

When SEO was in its infancy, getting back links to a site was the most important factor. In fact, many books and articles written on the subject will still tell people that getting back links is the only proper way to optimize a website. Back links with proper anchor text, of course.

After search engine optimization has a chance to mature, SEO specialists became aware that using only back links is not at all the best way to optimize a site. In fact, if an SEO is only creating back links, the site is not getting optimized.

In On page site optimization, there are techniques and tools that are related to your own website and in OFF page optimization, there are items which are related to the other websites. In On page the old technique was Meta Tag Optimization, appropriate content, Alt tag optimization, proper navigation for the website and much more activities through which changes were made to the website, itself. In OFF page optimization, only back links were created.

Today, optimization is a little bit different. While using the old techniques are still appropriate, creating a Sitemap can be added to the list. Sitemap is something that came in existence a few years ago.

A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps--usually called Sitemap with a capital 'S'--are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.

Sitemap is especially important if your site:

* Has dynamic content

* Has pages with a lot of flash or AJAX

* Is new and does not have many links

* Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well, or not at all

The use of Sitemap becomes doubly important if the site has pages that can only be accessed through user entry. Sitemap will assist web crawlers in finding and accessing the pages.

Google has a very nice Sitemap tool that will assist in the creation of Sitemap for a website.

Karen Vertigan Pope writes for Ciniva Systems, an award winning Virginia web design company. Ciniva specializes in web design and SEO. Ms. Vertigan Pope is the President of the SEO Department of Ciniva Systems.

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the name given to the process of making a website achieve high ranking in search engine queries. The most popular search engine by a long margin (60% of all searches worldwide) is Google, and so most effort is put towards optimizing for that website.

How to implement it

SEO is founded on good web design that consists of accessible and efficient code. Words or phases should be researched using online keyword popularity tools such as Overture and WordTracker to determine which keywords should be used in the text of your website. The ideal scenario is to find a keyword or phrase, or set of keywords or phrases that are frequently searched for, but are not found on many websites. Obviously, very popular searches will have many websites focussed on these keywords.

However, SEO is not only limited to keywords. Perhaps even more important is the PageRank factor. PageRank is a Google-created attribute that reflects a page's importance: the higher the PageRank (out of 10), the greater authority and importance your website has, and normally, this is reflected in your ranking on search engines. How PageRank is determined is a closely guarded secret (by Google), but it an important factor is the number of links from other websites to yours. The greater the number of links from high PageRanked websites, the higher your PageRank will be, and the better you will rank in searches.

The Long Tail

A Long Tail when applied to SEO is a term used to describe niche areas that in total receive greater interest or traffic than mainstream areas. For example, "books" is a very popular search term, whereas "antique art books" is much less popular. However, if you can optimize your website for those search terms, although you will not have as many people searching for the term, you are much more likely to be one of the top results returned. Furthermore, and most importantly, the people that have found your website are much more likely to be interested in your content, than if they were just searching for books. The Long Tail effect enables smaller specialist websites to survive and thrive, and it is important to consider when choosing your keywords.

When should you do SEO?

It is best to start SEO before you write the content of the website. This way you can ensure the keywords you have targeted are well incorporated into your text, in prominent positions, such as page titles, near the top of your page content, in headers, and emphasized in bold or in italics. However, if your website has already been made without considering SEO, you can still go back and make editions to the website content and design if necessary.

What you should not do

With the growing importance of search engines on the Internet as a method of finding information, SEO has become big business. There are now thousands of specialized businesses offering SEO alone, many making bold promises such as a guarantee of a top 10 rank in Google. Approach such offers with care, as you may be paying for a top 10 rank in a search phrase that receives no traffic at all!

You must also be exceptionally careful not to try and trick search engines. There are a huge number of dirty tricks that can be done to try and increase your ranking on searches, such as websites filled with thousands of links linking to yours. It is possible that such schemes may bring you temporary success, but it is almost guaranteed that your trickery will be found out, and then you can expect to be stripped of your rank, and possibly banned for good from the search engines. This is a risk that will not pay off.

Best practice

While SEO is essential to consider when trying to get a top-ranking site, if you have a website filled with quality content, and you are able to promote it so that other websites link to it, this is arguably the most important strategy you can employ. Although assorted SEO strategies and fads come and go, if you are producing good quality text that is useful, you are already giving your website a headstart. "Content is King" is the catchphrase coined to illustrate the importance of this.

Ben Coleman is the CEO and owner of Real Free Websites. He has been designing websites and working on website technologies since 1999. Real Free Websites was created to fill a niche: to offer free or low-cost customized websites and top quality hosting.