How to SEO a Website

by Jonathan Hochman
http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/how-to-seo-a-website.shtml

See also: How to SEO Flash

SEO is often sold as an expensive and time consuming service, but we have found that many websites can easily improve their search engine positioning by focusing on a few essential tactics.

The first thing to do is figure out your unique value proposition. What does your web site or web page offer that cannot be found elsewhere? When crafting your offer, it can be very useful to look at historical search trends to see what people are looking for. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Trends can give you this sort of data. Once you have decided on your unique offer and found the relevant keyword phrases that people actually use, the next step is to improve your website.

Search engine rankings are determined by a couple hundred factors, but the most important three that are within the webmaster's control are:

1. The search phrase needs to appear somewhere in the text of the page. It is not a good idea to overdo it with excessive repetition, but the content of the page should focus on it's most essential search phrases. Variations of the keyword such as plurals or stems (i.e. fish, fishing, fished) are good.
2. The search phase should occur in the HTML title tag at the top of the code. In most browsers you can visit a webpage and press Ctrl-U to view the source code. Look for the title and make sure it is descriptive:
   <title>Cape Cod Fish Market - Wellfleet, MA</title>
3. The page should have links pointing to it. Links within the website are good, as are links from outside the site. Any sort of promotion the helps increase the digital footprint of a website will tend to attract more links. If you can arrange for the target search phrases to be present within the link text, that is more helpful than a link with non-descriptive text, such as "click here".

One caveat: if your website is new, it may take several or many months before your site will rank for anything other than its name. If you have a new site, you should especially focus on attracting high quality links from other trustworthy websites. This is easy to recommend, but can be hard to accomplish.

Once the content of a website has been improved to focus on the right keywords, it is also a good idea to perform a technical review of the site to make sure search engines can successfull access all the pages, and to learn whether they have found any problems. Both Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools provide comprehensive diagnostics. You can use my simple website checklist, which has been published by SEMNE, to assemble data from multiple sources into a concise report.

Finally, you should install a tool such as Google Analytics to measure results, and then you should repeat this same process every month or quarter to ensure that your site continues to perform as well as possible.

About the Author

After graduating from Yale with two degrees in Computer Science, Jonathan Hochman set up his own consulting company in 1990. He has been an Internet marketer since 1994.