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Online Search is On; Is Your Website Ready?
Teena Rose is a columnist, personal branding expert,
public speaker, and career-marketing guru.
She’s author of a book on "How
to Start a Resume Writing Business,"
entitled "Starting a Home- or Office-based Resume Business"
... the
only major tool you'll need to start, operate, and profit from a
resume service. The book covers all the "nuggets" you'll need to
learn about during the start-up and daily operations of your
business.
If you’re the owner of a brick-and-mortar store, your business
depends on getting customers through the door. If you run an online
business, increasing traffic on your website is priority No. 1. And
the three letters synonymous with expanding the amount of visitors
to your site are S.E.O.
Search Engine
Optimization is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to
a Web site by ranking high in the results of a search engine. The
higher a site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the
chance that site will be visited by a user. So it doesn’t take a
Masters degree from Harvard to figure out that more visitors means
more business. On a base level, it’s like flipping through the phone
book. The ads near the front of a particular section will likely
generate more business than those in the back.
The owners of
Web-based businesses are on a constant quest to improve their
standings with search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, and there
are several ways to accomplish this. Rankings can be influenced by
the page title, metatag description, the text on a site and metatag
keywords, which are targeted phrases.
“The basics of
search engine optimization are surprisingly basic,” says Peter Kent
in his book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. “If fact, you
may be able to make small changes to your website that make a huge
difference in your site’s ranking in the search results.”
What Kent is
trying to say in his Dummies book is that it doesn’t take a genius
to improve their search engine standings. If you’re just starting to
create a website, it’s best to start from the beginning. Do the
preparation by defining the keywords that will reflect your site the
best. And there’s no need to include the entire Webster’s dictionary
into your keyword list since most search engines have limits on the
amount of meta keywords that can be viewed. Therefore, the keywords
should be short, sweet, and as specific as possible.
If you want to
nail the best keywords for your site, there is professional help.
Wordtracker.com, which puts out a weekly keyword report of the top
500, helps website owners and search engine marketers identify
keywords and phrases that are relevant and likely to be used the
most by search engine visitors. For instance, if have a website
relating to golf products, Wordtracker finds keywords and their
combinations, and then ranks those words by popularity.
The title of a
Web page says it all. After keywords have been established, include
the two or three most important words in the title, which should be
between 60 and 70 characters long. A title that’s longer will likely
get cut off when indexed by the search engines, resulting in a
ranking that plummets.
The page title
is only the beginning. The body copy on Web pages is even more
relevant than meta tags. Search engines look at this text and any
applicable content will improve rankings more than just meta tags.
If a higher
ranking can mean more profits for your Web business, keep in mind
that not all search engines are created alike. While you may rank
high in Google or MSN, you may find yourself nonexistent on Yahoo.
Search engines have different methods of ranking, so don’t avoid the
small ones and always stay on top of the technology in order to get
complete optimization. |