If you’re trying to get a return on your website investment, one of the best ways to do it is by optimizing your site for search engines. This is commonly known as SEO (search engine optimization) and basically consists of doing things a certain way to make your site more friendly to the software that runs popular search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo Search. This software has come a long way since the early days of the web and is now amazingly intelligent. If you think about it, the goal of the search engine designers is to provide their users with the best and most relevant content according to whatever is typed into the search box. If you tried a search engine by typing in “digital cameras” and the first page of results were nothing but links to spam sites with lots of pages repeating the 2 words “digital cameras” over and over, you’d never use that search engine again. So the programmers at companies like Google are constantly refining their algorithms to do a better job of finding and sorting content that really is what you’re looking for. To do a proper job of SEO on your own site, you need to take into account how these algorithms work and what they look for.

Content is King

The first thing anyone needs to know about SEO is the old adage, “Content is King”. This refers to the fact that the best way to get your site ranked on search engines is to actually have great content. This can mean different things for different types of sites. For blogs it means regular updates, unique article content, and relevant content. On the other hand, for e-commerce sites it can mean having accurate product information and properly categorizing your products. In the old days it was enough to use good keyword and description tags on your pages, but nowadays the software that drives search engines is pretty sophisticated and actually parses through your page to make sure your content is actually useful and relevant to the keywords you use.

Keywords

Modern search engines still use keywords, but not in the way that they used to. Instead of focusing on the keywords specified in the “meta keywords” tag, most engines now go through your page content and index all the words used. They are smart enough to tell whether your article is actually about what you say it’s about. If you are trying to rank for the keyphrase “digital camera” then obviously your article should mention digital cameras a few times. But don’t think you can fool them by mentioning your keywords over and over, either. Nobody wants a page full of nothing but “digital camera digital camera” and so the search engines will penalize you for what’s known as “keyword stuffing”, and you should make sure not to over-use your target keywords. It also makes a difference where your keywords are used. Certain places are assigned more value by search engine software, such as page titles, heading tags, and the URL itself. For instance, if you look in your address bar right now, you will see that the URL to this post contains the keywords “SEO basics”, and so does the page title.

Backlinking

Backlinking is the practice of getting links to your site to be displayed on other sites. This is important because one of the ways search engines calculate your site’s relative worth is by counting how many other sites are providing their users with links to your content. The way the search engines see it, if there are a lot of other people pointing people to your site, then your site must have some worthwhile information on it. So your ranking can be nicely boosted by increasing the number of other sites linking to yours. This is one of the more complicated aspects of SEO, as it doesn’t involve what you put on your site as much as what others put on their site.
But there are simple things you can take advantage of, such as the fact that when you comment on someone’s post on their site they will allow you to specify your site’s URL, and display your comment with a link back to your site. There are also article and e-zone sites which allow you to publish content on their site, and of course link back to your site as a way of crediting you with authorship. You can even contact the webmasters of well-respected sites and just ask them to put up a link to your site. Make sure your content is something they will want to link to first, and it always helps if you offer to return the favor!

Sitemaps

A sitemap is a single page that contains a list or tree-like structure consisting of links to every page on your site. This makes it easier for search engines to index your site and find all your pages. It also makes it easier for people to get where they want to go. The less clicks they have to make to get to the content they’re looking for, the better.

Proper Image Handling

Images, graphics, and Flash animations all make your site more pleasing to the eye, but unfortunately search engines still aren’t capable of interpreting what’s in them. So to a search engine that big colorful picture of a digital camera on your page means nothing and won’t help your ranking at all. However, the good news is that there is a way to let search engines know what the picture is all about, and that is the ALT property of the image tag. Specifying your ALT tags and filling them with keywords will greatly help your SEO if your site has a lot of pictures. Search engines are now getting smart enough to look at the words near your pictures as well. So use captions when you can.

Social Media

One of the more powerful modern techniques for SEO is distributing your content on social media sites such as Facebook. Notice the buttons at the top and bottom of each post on our blog? Giving your users a quick and easy way to share your content with friends can exponentially increase exposure to your site and put links out there in surprising places. Social media platforms are free, easy to use and most have easily-implemented buttons or links you can paste right into your content to allow sharing.

Professional Help

Of course, the easiest way to improve your SEO is simply to hire a professional to do it for you. And of course, here at Apex Complete we have in-house SEO specialists that leverage modern technology and up-to-date information on search engine algorithms to provide proven results on the major search engines. Contact us now to get a free quote based on your current site and your SEO goals!