Basic SEO tips to help you get started

  What do you do when you need to find some information on the Web ? You just jump to one of the major search engines and type in the query that you’re looking for and then click through the search results, right? But search engines weren’t always around.

In the beginning the Internet was a confusing mass of documents. Finding information, by searching the World Wide Web, was nearly impossible until the search engines came along and when they came,they got their job done by providing the required information to the users and by this way more and more people started gaining access to these search engines for their queries and thus the dependence on search engines for information increased.

 Thus in this way Search engines evolved and then spranged up a concept called Search Engine optimization(SEO) which is constantly growing day by day as the Web is developing.

 Search engine optimization (SEO) is a broader term which means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Precisely, SEO is about the on-page and off-page design strategies you can use to improve your search engine rankings. In other words, it is about doing whatever you need to do to ensure that your web site ranks as high as possible in search engine results.There are so many facets of search engine optimization, from how search engines work (and they all work a little differently) to how a web page is designed.

 Search engine optimization is the concept of maximizing the traffic that your web site generates. It requires a lot of time and a lot of hard work. As Search engines are constantly changing, the methods and strategies used to achieve high search engine rankings are also changing. Let me focus your attention towards the 10 very basic SEO tips to help you get started:-

1. Monitor where you stand:-

You won’t know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings. It is always advisable that you keep an eye on your page rank with tools like Alexa and the Google toolbar. It’s also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they’re using to find your site.

 2. Keywords, keywords, keywords!

 You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?

 The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put you keywords. BEWARE of Putting ridiculous amounts of keywords on your site which will get you labeled as a spammer, and search engine spiders are programmed to ignore sites guilty of “keyword-stuffing.” Be strategical in your keyword use.

 3. Link back to yourself:-

 There is probably no more basic strategy for SEO than the integration of internal links into your site — it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages. You should make it standard to link back to your archives frequently when creating new content. It is advisable that you also make the anchor text search-engine-friendly: “The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms.”

As with all other SEO approaches, be sure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to cross the line into excessive linking — you don’t want your visitors to get annoyed.

4. Create a sitemap:-

Adding a site map — a page listing and linking to all the other major pages     on  your site — makes it easier for spiders to search your site. The fewer clicks necessary to get to a page on your website, the better.

5. Search-friendly URLs:-

Make your URLs more search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords. For instance, it’s easy to understand what ‘www.example.com/example1/tenses’ would contain. It’s less easy to understand if the in-house classification system of the business is used, for example ‘www.example.com/11985/j702.htm’. A dynamic URL is similarly off-putting, even if it contains recognisable words: ‘www.example.com/search/?s=”tenses”‘.

6. Avoid use of Flash:

Flash might look pretty, but it does nothing for your SEO. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page… Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

7. Use Image descriptions:-

Spiders can only search text, not text in your images — which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible. Start with your image names: adding an “ALT” tag allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your site. The visible text around your images is valuable for SEO.

8. CONTENT is King:-

Your content needs to be fresh — updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic. The best sites for users, and consequently for search engines, are full of updated, useful information about a given service, product, topic or discipline. One way to ensure that your site gets new content on a frequent basis is to integrate a blog. An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, create more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more personal voice.

9. Social media distribution:-

A CEO blog is just one element of social media distribution. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms. Whether displayed on your company’s account, or recommended, re-tweeted, and re-distributed by someone else, this strategy exponentially muliplies the number of places where visitors will view your links.

10. Link to others:-

An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites. It is always suggestable that you personally ask the webmasters of well-respected sites if they’ll include a link to your site on theirs. Be sure to return the favor — then everyone wins! Make certain that your partner has a good web-reputation, of course. Beware against getting tied to a “link farm” whose bad SEO habits could bring you down.

 Search engine optimization is really a balance of what you do and what yoou do not do. SEO is a process which needs your time, effort, commitment. You don’t do SEO in one day and reap its fruits tomorrow. It is a constant and consistent process.

So be ready to completely smoke your competitors in the search engine war and you’re virtually GUARANTEED success if you will follow all the ethical SEO practices.