What is it?
This is how your site is tweaked and polished to make it as friendly as possible to search engines and to get ranked as high as possible on their lists. This can be a tricky business and there are no guarantees. Especially in highly competitive markets. Whether or not you need this polishing depends on the purpose of your site. If you are just setting up a web site for your own clients or family and not depending on anyone ‘finding’ you, ranking is not an issue and you need not read on.
If you are depending on the site to ‘catch’ business from surfers … it makes sense that you want to be ranked as high as possible with the major search engines. This will be a consideration as to how your site is designed so it’s important to know right from the start if optimization is to be emphasized.
Your Role in Optimization
One of the keys to site optimization is in having other sites link to you. Google views this as a bonus and gives you a higher score when figuring out your ranking. Therefore, it’s wise to promote your site by submitting it to as many business directories or similar interest web sites as possible. Some of these submissions cost a yearly fee and some do not and the submissions are your responsibility.
What I Do For You
Briefly, here is what I do to make your site optimum:
- Help you with a domain name. It’s good to have a descriptive domain name … eg. kelownashoefactory.com is better than ipsydipsidoodle.com for the same company (unless the company is known popularly by that latter title.)
- Allow the site to be easily found. I design it so it displays content in such a way that it attracts the search words used by your targeted audience.
- Set up the meta code (programming language) so it is up to the latest standards, and so it is a desirable environment for the search engine robots that visit your site. Search engine robots get ‘annoyed’ when the web site contains old and confusing language … and this may cause them to move on.
- Tweak the front page content so it is as relevant as possible to the words people use to find it.
- Submit a .xml generated sitemap to Google so they will be able to better explore your site.
- Run a series of tests that help to determine it’s efficiency for search engine placement. I then make a number of adjustments until it is efficiently set up for the web-bots. One very important test is the keyword density analysis, which tells me the relevance of all the words on your site. Very important to get this right. And you may have guessed, this is one of the more time consuming parts of the endeavor.
- Of course, time is a factor. It takes a while for your site to begin showing up on search engines, sometimes up to three months. In that time, it is important for you to begin advertising your site as much as possible.
Remember, having other sites link to you is very important, and that is something you can do to give yourself an edge. If you take the time and have your site optimized, your ranking will be favorable.
