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Web page optimization involves placing keywords related to your website and the services you are providing on your site. There are several ways and places to do this on your website. You (or your website designer—make sure you tell him/her that you want your site fully optimized) should first make sure you name your page appropriately.
For example, look at the title of this page (found at the top of the page in your browser). The keywords used in the title are relevant to the content of this page. This is the first way to help optimize your web page to be found in search engines.
Another way is through the use of meta tags. These tags expand on the keywords used in the title but can not be seen on your web page. Instead they are inserted into the code of your site under the heading meta tags-keywords. A real estate agent from Tampa Bay, Florida might use the following as meta tags for his/her web site: Tampa Bay real estate, homes, house, Florida, Tampa Bay, sell house, buy house, real estate agent, property find, buy property, MLS, mortgage, real estate, Tampa RE agent, etc. You want to include important words and phrases relevant to the content of your website.
It doesn’t matter in what order you list them, simply try to list the top 15-20 keywords associated with what you do. When people type in these keywords to look for relevant sites, having proper meta tags in place will boost your listing with the search engines. A great tool for finding keywords related to what you do can be found here. Simply type in a word or phrase that describes what your site is about and it will create a list of related words/phrases and show you how popular they are in terms of searches per month.
Keyword density weighting throughout the content of the information on your web page is also very important. Some engines only search through the first few paragraphs of text on each page, others search all of the text. Use heading tags and subheading tags for the text on your page like how you would outline a research paper. Every heading should contain keywords relevant to your content.
The search engines also search for alternate image tags that can be attached to any pictures or graphics used on your web site. An image tag is a name for each particular picture. In our example above, an image of a house on that site might be named “Tampa Bay Florida real estate agent”. It’s important to name every image. Do not "stuff" your images with many different tags. Keep it short and simple.
Quality & relevant content is the key. There is no substitute for good content. All the tips and tricks in the world will not replace the value you provide by having useful information for your website's visitors. Also, it's worth mentioning to avoid any "black hat" techniques-hidden text/links, tag stuffing, and other gimmicks designed to trick the search engines. Build your site the right way from day one and it will last the test of time.
SEO starts with listing your site under the appropriate category in the open directory located at http://www.dmoz.org . It can take a while to have your site listed there, if at first it doesn’t show up after some time you will have to re-submit it until it is listed. It helps if you have a quality, relevant site and are submitting it to the proper category.
You also want to start building your link popularity on the web. Successful link popularity involves having other quality and relevant sites place a link on their site that directs people to your site. You can check your (or your competitors) link popularity on the major search engines here.
Sometimes you might have to reciprocate a link with another web site in order for them to link back to you, however one way links back to your site are the premium links to acquire. Some top web sites charge a fee for them to link to you but there are also many places that will give you one way links for free. A good place to find them is to see who your competitors are linked with.
Being listed in the open directory and building a rich link popularity with respect to your competitors will help engines find and rank your page. This combined with web page optimization will ensure that your web site will be found and ranked highly whenever anyone types in keywords relating to your web site. It will also make sure that the search engines will keep your site ranked higher than your competitors.
Your efforts from web page and search engine optimization may take several months before you start seeing solid results. This is because it takes about that long before the search engines will crawl your site and store it in their cache (memory).
The best way to develop an overnight internet presence is through pay-per-click advertising. Basically what you are doing is bidding on keywords. If someone types in the keyword(s) you are bidding on your sites advertisement will show up in a listing. Your placement in this listing depends on how much you are willing to pay for a click-through to your web site in respect to others bidding on that same keyword.
The best places to bid on keywords are on Google and Overture (Yahoo). Google Adwords can be found here. It costs $5 to start up an account; from there you simply create an ad and list keywords and how much you are willing to pay for a click-through. You can set a daily cap to limit the maximum you are willing to pay in total for each day. Google’s Ads run almost instantly after you have your account and ad set up. You can run as many ads with as many keywords as you like.
Overture can be found here. It is very similar to Google’s Adwords--you bid on keywords to determine your placement in the sponsored listings. It costs $30 to start up, that money is then applied to your click-through bids. It also requires a minimum $20 advertising floor each month. It might take up to five days until your ads are running on the Yahoo network.
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