How to Optimize Your Site for Search

The Web is home to some 120 million Internet domains and tens of billions of indexed pages. But every company, big or small, can draw more traffic by using search-engine optimization -- SEO, for short. SEO isn't magic. It probably won't land your site among the Top 10 websites for highly popular search terms. Nor will it drive traffic to a site that doesn't offer anything of value.  

Do you need a consultant to do SEO? Only if you don't have time. SEO can be very time consuming, so consider your busy schedule before getting into it on your won. What follows will help you improve performance on two of the most important ranking factors: the strength of keywords associated with a page and the organization and functionality of the website.

1. Choosing Keywords
   The basic premise of keyword optimization is simple: Discover the search words that potential customers are using to find products or services like yours, and then build your Web content around those words. What complicates matters is that countless other websites are trying to do the same thing.
   
   Do the math. First, draw up a list of the keywords -- or, better yet, keyword phrases -- a potential customer might plausibly search if he or she were looking for your product. (A bike retailer, for example, might start with variations on bike, bicycle, and cycling; a specialty shop might also try bike frames and bike components.)
   
   Then, see how often users search for these terms by plugging each into keyword-tracking tools such as Wordtracker (wordtracker.com), Keyword Discovery (keyworddiscovery.com), or Google AdWords's Keyword Tool (adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). 
2. Placing Keywords Strategically
   Once you have determined the best keywords to use, you need to employ them strategically, in two places.
   
   In the HTML code. It is the search engine that ultimately associates a keyword with a webpage, and the first place it looks to decipher a page is at the top of the page's coding. These are often called meta tags, and the code often begins with that word.
   
   In the visible content. Your keywords should appear frequently in the text, as well as in the other elements of a page, including the descriptive "alt" tags that underlie images and in the headlines and subheads atop a section of text. Beware: Never stuff a page so full of keywords that it doesn't read naturally.
3. Building a Better Website
   How your site is organized, designed, and built will affect its search-engine ranking. Your navigation must be clear ans simple. One of the key factor is "less is more", do not over-crowd your home page with to much data, keep it simple.  
   
   Other strategies are more technical, so you may need to rely on a Web developer for assistance. The site must be hosted on a fast server. The page code should be free of bugs and fully comply with the standards for website structure set by the World Wide Web Consortium. (You can test this at validator.w3.org.) Include in the site's code a special protocol known as Sitemap, which makes it easier for visiting search engines to scan the site. Sitemaps can be submitted directly to the search engines.
4. Link building
   Once you have optimized your website, you want to attract links from other sites. SEO consultants offer a fairly prosaic strategy: Build a good site with useful content to which other sites will want to send their readers. Be choosy about linkers. You want the best sites, not the most, to link to you. If an expert links to you, by association you're an expert (provided the expert is in your subject area). By the same token, avoid link farms, or websites that exist solely to provide outbound links, and services that sell links outright. Search engines will penalize you for the chicanery.