optimisation tips

Optimizing your website for the search engines is essential if you want to improve your website ranking and build a successful online business. Most people who search online don't go past the first two pages of results. If you want your website to be profitable it must rank highly with the search engines.
Using search engine optimization (SEO)will help your site rank highly with Google and other search engines.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the method of improving a websites ability to attract natural or 'organic' traffic from the search engines. A site that is well optimized is more likely to appear higher in the search results for a given keyword and therefore will recive more traffic. In order to achieve this you must optimize your site for your chosen keywords. Here are a few tips on how to improve your Google ranking and get more visitors to your site.

• Use your keywords in your domain name where ever possible. Try to choose a short, easy to remember and avoid numbers and hyphens.
  
  
• Your content needs to be relevant to the search results but more so for your readers. Google in particular rewards sites that provide quality information. The more useful content is the better chance you have of ranking highly in Google's search results. 

• Not only will updating your page often keep your readers interested and coming back for more but your site is more likely to be crawled more often.Want to know how often your site is crawled? Get Google's Crawl Stats Button here. 

• Internal linking will ensure all of your pages are spidered. You can use internal linking in the footer, links within the text or some form of navigation in the header or sidebar. 

• Have others link to your site will help improve website ranking. Google perceives sites with more backlinks as high quality and therefore will rank them higher.  

• Research what keywords people are searching for when looking for your product. Do you know the difference between browsing keywords and buying keywords?  A person searching for "ipods" is less likely to be ready to purchase than someone searching for "Apple iPod Touch 8GB". Find the right keywords for your site. 

• Are you using enough keywords on your page? Your keywords will need to be  used enough to be detected by the search engines but overusing keywords will make it unnatural to read and will do more harm your ranking then good. Use the keyword density tool to help optimize your site. 

• Keep your code clean and free from errors. The problem with many website builders is that they use bloated code to create pages which result slow loading pages and web spiders unable to effectively read your page. 

• Avoid using frames and flash on your sites. Flash is invisible to most web spiders, the spiders that can read flash often spend more time trying to get through the flash code and don't index the remainder of your site. Although Adobe has been working with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable in the search engines the best bet for now is to avoid them if you want your site to be ranked highly for your keywords. 

• Keep your webpages less than 100kb to reduce loading time. Some people still use dial up internet so it is important to have fast loading pages. For the same reason limit your number and size of images. 

• Make use of the ALT tags within your images, not only is this a legal requirement for those who are visualy impaired but it helps the search engines decipher your content. Web spiders cannot 'see' images so by adding text min the alt tags you are describing your image. Make sure you describe the image accurately. For example if your picture is a statue you may wish to add "Hardcarved stone abstact statue by artist William O'Neil" rather than "statue". Don't go overboard 'stuffing'  alt tags with you keywords this won't help your rankings but rather get you penalized by Google.