Optimize Your Website

How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines ?

From the moment you create a website you start caring about one thing a lot: high ranks on search engines. To get your site to the top of search results, it is important to optimize your website for search engines. The more compliant your website is, the higher the chance for its content to be recommended to audiences by their respective search engines. Although most practices are common sense, sometimes it does not make sense.

Some junk websites might rank higher than your website on search engines. You might think you’re doing everything right, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works in a quite mysterious way. Here are some of the best SEO practices that might keep you on track and not piss off search engines.

 

Optimize Your Website

 

How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines ?

Write Good and Authentic Content

As it may sound cliché, content is the key. Write a bunch of good and informative content, and search engines eventually will reward you. Do not put up a farm content of marketing spam keywords.

Headlines, Titles, and Meta tags

Put the most relevant keyword in an article’s title. Put “sub-keywords” as headlines.
Place all relevant keywords that are used in the content into meta keywords. Put a brief description of the page of 150 symbols into meta description.

Markup

Use appropriate tags for headers, navigation, actual content, header tags, picture captions, footer, etc. Use <h1> for article title; put the navigation menu in an unordered list; make the use of <h2>, <h3> for sub-heads with important keywords; put your actual content text in one <div> with an ID or Class called “content”; make the use of the “alt” tag for pictures; put information such as “About”, “Contact Us”, etc. in the footer part of the website.

Links

In your content, link to other blogs or websites. If you write good content and link to others properly, others will link back to your articles, eventually. Links are, in my mind, the most important portion in search engine’s ranking algorithms.

Page URLs

Having relevant keywords in your page’s URL can help your website rank higher for particular that keywords. The URL, however, has to be short and not spammy. For example, http://site.com/kim-kardashian-divorce is a lot more cleaner are respectful than  http://site.com/omg-kim-kardashian-dumped-kris-humphries-in-less-than-three-months

Webmaster Tools

Make use of Google’s Webmaster Tools and Analytics. They can help you greatly to learn more about your own site and optimize it better. There are many articles on Webmaster Tools on how to achieve the best results using those tools.

Avoid Stupidity

Do not try to fool the search engines. Just don’t. You could get penalized forever.

Do not put a list of irrelevant keyboards in the color of the page’s background, or in the size of 500px, or hide with CSS or JavaScript. Search engines are smarter than you if you do not want to think so.

Do not put fake titles, headlines, etc. Once the search engine finds out about it, that might be the dark end of your website’s traffic from search engines.

There are no step by step instructions on how to get onto the first page of Google results. If there were, well, it would not be fair, and it would destroy the whole purpose of SEO. Whatever SEO practice you do, stop for a second and use common sense to see if you are doing it right. Do not try to outsmart the system, because you cannot.

This article is written by Aleksey Donets. Feel free to ask me any questions about this post or <a href=”http://www.ucoz.com/”>how to create a website for free</a>.