Our Monmouth Blog

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a process for increasing natural search engine results. There are no magic elixirs to get you top rankings over night. SEO is never completed it is something that needs to be tweaked and watched on a regular basis. But if you are committed, success is possible even with competitive keywords. Since PPC (Pay Per Click) has gotten extremely expensive search engine optimization becomes even more important for all businesses from smallest one person operations to the largest corporations. It is not uncommon for businesses to bid over $5 per click on competitive keywords. There are a few things to keep in mind when you commit to SEO either by doing it yourself or having it done by a professional.

Content is king when it comes to site engine optimization and drawing visitors to your website. Choice of language and descriptive terms are very important because ultimately this is how a search engine will categorize your site. There is a great tool called SEOQuake which has a key word density tool. This tool provides a quick and accurate picture of what your site keywords are. It is important that the keyword density of your content align with your meta keywords. Wayne Hurlbert in a great post on webpronews.com said “No more than 2% of a web page’s words should be the targeted keywords. Any more will be considered spamming.” He also reminds us that “Poorly written copy might draw some extra visitor traffic, but is unlikely to convert that traffic into sales.” We must resist all attempts to needless stuff pages with keywords, it will not help your efforts.

If you want to be successful your pages must be correctly coded. Your site should validate properly according to W3C coding standards. W3C Markup Validation Service, is a free service that checks Web documents (pages) in formats like HTML for conformance to W3C recommendations and other standards. Once you have properly coded pages <Title> tags, meta “keyword” and “description” tags, and <h1> tags can have a great influence on your search results. I would like to dig deeper into successful coding of pages in a future post but I would like to point out a simple check without looking at any code. What do your page titles say about your website to its users and search engines?

Site age plays a large role in how well a site ranks particularly in Google. Jim Boykins Internet marketing specialist has said “… a huge majority of sites will not get into the top 30 of Google for competitive phrases without having been online for at least 2 years.” in his Feb 2007 blog post. Jim Westergren and randfish of SEOmoz.org have discussed in detail about Google sandbox and the credibility/time delay it puts on sites. Unfortunately there are no short cuts here with a good amount of patience you will see results.

Without being technically savvy there are several things you can do to see the SEO health of your site. The bottom line is that if any of the basic principles I have discussed here are not correct on your site than there are things you can do to improve your natural search engine rankings.

Regards,

Howard

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