How to Optimize Your Website -An Introduction to SEO

Whether your business is local or global, more and more people are using the search engines to locate services, products and information.

To get your website found you need to optimize your website, and to do that you need a basic understanding of how search search engines work, and how to Optimise your pages and site for the search engines.

 SEO  (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of creating and organising web pages so that they achieve high rankings in the search engine results (SERPS).

Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization/Optimisation)

For a basic website the Optimization process is relatively straightforward, as there are only four main factors that effect your web pages position in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page):

• Your Choice of Keywords
• Your Web page/ site content and Structure
• The links to and from your web site
• Your Competitors

There are 4 aspects to the optimisation process.

• Keyword Research - Finding and choosing the best Keywords to target
• Web Page Optimisation- Optimising the web page copy and Meta Tags for the correct keywords.
• Linking- Establishing inbound links via various methods like  directories submission, article marketing,, blogging.
• Site structure - Creating an optimized site Navigation structure.
 

There are two, and only two, ways of optimizing/optimising your website for the search engines:

• On page Optimization- This involves making changes to your web page copy, site structure meta tags etc
• Off Page Optimization- Getting appropriate links to your site.

To help typical small business/local business owners I've put together a short 5 part mini course -SEO for small Business Websites which covers all of the main aspects.

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