Economical Search Engine Optimization - SEO - is what SEO work should be - economical. Optimizing your site for the search engines does not have to be expensive if you have the ability to either make changes to your site yourself, or tell your programmer exactly what you want. What you will find if you are looking to get Optimizing help for your website are some fairly expensive consultants charging a lot per hour.
Why SEO Consultants Cost So Much
The thinking behind high fees is that very few folks know SEO as it a constantly changing business. And once a site has been optimized the need for a full time SEO consultant goes down considerably. You could say that there is little job security long term with an SEO consultant on any one project so they need to get paid for their work and get out. Are there other alternatives than paying a lot of money to have your site optimized by a professional.
What You Should Do First To Make Money With A Website
Before you spend money on a website do yourself a favor and learn a little about Search Engine Optimization. Web designers and programmers do some great things in what they do. If you use a web designer, you'll probably get a great looking site, perhaps one with some Flash that looks really great. If you use a programmer you'll probably get some great forms and database application to capture email addresses and names of visitors who offer their information to you. But, without a well optimized site, these fancy looking sites and features won't make a difference because no one will find your site.
Unfortunately, a lot of web designers and programmers do not know the first thing, or they know very little, about how to optimize your site for the search engines and web directories. To get found by people doing searches on the Internet your site will have the Search Engine Optimized. There are many folks on the Internet charging a lot of money to optimize websites. Most of us however, cannot afford the high prices of these high charging consultants. Below you will find a simple checklist of optimization tips you can use to make a dramatic improvement in how well your site will show up in the search engines.
Search Engine Optimization Tips That Will Save and Make You Money
- Optimizing Meta Tags - Page Title, Description, Keywords
- Optimizing Arrangement of Page Elements
- Gotta Get Backlinks
- Optimizing Keyword Density
The basic understanding that you need to know about optimizing your website is that you will want to optimize every page on your site. Generally, you need to do each page in the same way. Each page must have a common theme. This leads us into our first key item for optimizing a website
Optimizing Meta Tags
Meta Tags are very important in how search engine spiders interpret your website. The first thing that a search engine spider will see when they come to a page on your website are the meta tags. These meta tags are Title, Description, and Keywords. For each page that you optimize you will want to include that particular page's primary keyword as close to the beginning of the Title, Description, and Keyword list in your meta tags.
Optimizing Pages On Your Website
In this section I am talking about the page as it looks in the browser. If you work with a programmer you will want them to put your primary keyword in the main header for the page. If you are making changes yourself you can apply these changes. The "main header" for the page is commonly known as an H1 tag. Sometimes the H1 becomes the title of the page. If this is the case that is good because your main keyword for that page will show up where it needs to show up for the search engine spiders to find it.
You will also want to write any content for the page so that the primary keyword for the page will be shown in the first paragraph and the last paragraph of the page. You will also want to make sure that all of your image files (pictures) have an ALT tag (name) associated with it. Spiders don't read images, so you want to have your image named. Choose a short name that is relevant to the primary keyword of the page, or relevant to the section where the picture is located.
Gotta Get Backlinks
What this means is that you need to spend some time getting to know other website owners who will link to you. You will also want to get backlinks from Article Directories, Web Directories, Discussion Forums or Boards, Newsites, and Blogs. There is no easy trick other than going out and learning how to get links from other sites. The more links from other sites to yours makes your site that much more important to the search engines. It is like those other sites are voting for yours as a helpful tool.
The temptation of link exchange is pretty strong when you set out to get backlinks. You do want to be careful to not give away too many links from your site in the beginning. More inbound links to your site are better. A link exchange with another site will lessen the value of the link if it is not a one way link pointing to you. You will also want to give the site that is looking to link to you what you want the Anchor Text to be. The anchor text is very important to the SE's and web directories in how they view what your site should be noted for.
Pay attention to Keyword Density
Given that you have a primary keyword picked out for a particular page, you will want to make sure that the page of content has the primary keyword mentioned several times in the text of the page. There is very little direction in what is the right number of times per all the other words, hence keyword density. A good rule of thumb is that you only want to put it into your content as many times as you would naturally speak it in a conversation with someone. If you read your page outloud to yourself, you'll be able to see if it sounds weird if you have the word mentioned too many times. You can get penalized for stuffing your article too many times for a particular keyword.
In summary, these are some very basic guidelines that you can implement on your own without paying someone to help you. Once you have this complete, you may want to invite a SEO consultant in to help. I would not do it right way, give your economical search engine optimization efforts have 3 months to take hold. In the mean time, keep up with producing more content and learn more SEO.
Article by Dale Stouffer. Dale has been a mortgage broker and network marketer since 1996. He is the owner of GetPreQualified.com, a website dedicated to helping homebuyers determine how much they can borrow to buy a home - to Get Pre Qualified.
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