Search Engine Optimization – White Paper
Monday, September 22nd, 2008Important steps to search engine optimization
1. Website / Business profile (niche)
2. Acquiring a domain name
3. Finding the best hosting provider for your website
4. Website design (DIY or by a Professional Developer)
5. Keywords research
6. Getting the Page Title Right
7. Meta Data (description, keywords, etc…)
8. Page Content
9. Creating and Submitting Sitemaps
10. On-Page Optimization (heading tags, body text, image alt tags, links title tags, etc)
11. Internal Linking
12. Outbound Links
13. Off-Page Optimization (Links Building)
1. Website / Business profile (niche) »»
You might have the website / business profile already picked, but we would like to assume that you don’t so we can have somewhere to start with.
First is to ask yourself what are you selling, is it a product or a service?
What can you do to get this business kicking, online?
Is the business suitable for online audience?
Have you targeted any goals by having an online presence and what are them?
Is it going to be a local business, country specific or international?
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2. Acquiring a domain name »»
If you don’t already have a domain name, than is time to get one.
Make a list of few domain names that you would like to acquire, keeping the name as close as possible to your business / website profile.
Best domain names are 2-3 short words that together forms a single word (that describes at it’s best what the website is about), followed by the TLD (.com, .net, .ie, etc) [e.g. eire-webdesign.ie (eire = Ireland; web design)]
As per example above, you can make use of dashes (-) to separate your words, but Why? is explained below.
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3. Finding the best hosting provider for your website »»
Now that you’ve found & purchased the domain name/s, it’s time to shop around for a hosting package.
As mentioned previously, based on your target location, it’s best to find a hosting provider in that area.
Please note that some local hosting providers do have server outside the country your are targeting, so do not hesitate to ask, making sure that is exactly what you are looking for, or at least as closed as possible.
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4. Website Design (DIY or by a Professional Developer) »»
Getting a website designed it ain’t that tricky, and most website owners takes a shot at it, but getting it right is.
Website development has changed so much in the last 2-3 years that even a pro could be old news if he/she doesn’t keep up with the technology.
I remember when I designed my first website back in 2000. For me at that time was a great achievement, taking in consideration I never went to any web design courses. Black was in fashion, so my website had a black background.
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5. Keywords Research »»
You’ve already found some keywords when looking for a domain name, but what use they have when optimizing your website for search engines?
Keywords, are the words a user types into the search engines search box to find relevant websites to his/her query.
Two or more keywords are better know as key-phrases.
Keywords, held an important role into search engine optimization, helping you write good content related to your business/website profile.
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6. Getting the Page Title Right »»
”Page Title” – the most important tag when optimising for search engines, it’s the html tag found in between the <head>…. <title>Title Here</title> …</head> tag.
This tag is not visible on the page itself, but in the source code of the page. Can be also seen at the top of your browser window (blue bar for Internet Explorer) and at the bottom of the screen.
Why Page Title is so important?
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7. Meta Data (description, keywords, etc…) »»
Meta tags are part of the html source code of a page and can be found between the
<head>
…..
<meta name=”description” content=”content here” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords,here” />
…..
</head>
tags itself.
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8. Page Content »»
“Content is King” – You probably heard that a lot and it’s very true.
The more text you have on the page the better, but please note: Don’t start adding all kind of text on the page just to be there.
The content should be descriptive, written for users not search engines and should make a lot of sense.
The story, article, product or service description should have a flow in the right direction.
Take a look at an article in the today’s newspaper.
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9. Creating and Submitting Sitemaps »»
Sitemaps plays an important role when optimising your website for search engines as it helps them indexing your website (especially deep linked pages) and manage their crawl activities.
A sitemap is either an HTML page, XML or TEXT file that contains a list of all the pages available on your website or at least the most important pages (for large websites).
The HTML format sitemaps, are mostly used for visitors as a quick navigation point through the website, while a more advance way are XML (Google search engine) or TEXT file (YAHOO search engine).
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10. On-Page Optimization (heading tags, body text, image alt tags, links title tags, etc) »»
Do you know what’s great about this part?
The fact that everything you need to do here is at your finger-tips as you own the website and all files that are located on your server.
This includes pages, pdf files, images, videos, word documents, etc…
The on-page elements include:
1. Page Title
2. Meta Tags
3. Headings Tags (h1 to h6)
4. Content (also known as Body Text)
5. Internal Linking
6. Outbound Links
7. Images alt tag
8. Link (href) title tag
9. Paragraphs ( text included between
….
HTML tag)
10. Bold, Italic and Underlined text
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11. Internal Linking »»
In this section we will be talking and concentrating more on “Main Navigation Links“ and “In-Context Links“ elements.
Many website owners spend a lot of time trying to acquire inbound links from other websites, but ignores or forgets their own site where they have so much control over.
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12. Outbound Links »»
Outbound links to quality and relevant sites can help your own performance in the search engines but take in consideration the following points:
1. Not too many links – don’t over do it
2. Make sure they are relevant to your topic
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13. Off-Page Optimization (Link Building) »»
A search engine optimization campaign to be successful, you need to acquire a large amount of (preferable high-quality) keyword-rich links to your website, method that has a very strong influence in search engine ranking.
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