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Our clients who prefer to do their own web development often ask us how to optimize a web site for Google and other search engines. Here are some general tips.
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- Find out which keywords your clients are really searching for. A great tool for this is Wordtracker, which tracks search statistics on several search sites. Enter the search string that you are interested in and it will tell you some popular related searches. This service might seem expensive, but it's good value for anyone who is serious about search engine optimization. And you can try it free for seven days. We are in no way affiliated with Wordtracker.com, by the way.
- Persuade other sites to link to your site using anchor text that contains keywords for which you want your site to perform well on Google. It is far better for sites to link to you using text than using a graphic because Google will regard that text as being the topic of your site. This, and the previous tip, are the two most important things you can do to help your site's performance on Google. Also, because Google also takes into account how well it regards the sites that link to you, we strongly recommend that you register your site with some well-respected web directories, such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org).
- In the title tag for each page of your site, put keywords that are relevant to that page. Then be sure to use those keywords in the text on the page. Google regards the title tag as indicating the topic of the page. When Google sees those keywords on the page, it interprets this as further confirmation that the page really is about that subject.
- Write compelling content. Be sure to use the keywords that you really care about in your content, but do not pack it with keywords artificially.
- Use the keywords you care about when creating internal links on your web site. Make sure your site has a site map that links to every page on the site using anchor text that includes the search terms you care about. If your site uses drop-down menus, consider using cascading style sheets (CSS) to implement them, rather than using JavaScript menus. For an example of CSS menus, take a look at the code for the menus on this site.
- Remember that search engine optimization is a slow process. You will see no change to your ranking until Google's robot visits your web site and sees the changes. Depending how important Google thinks your web site is and how often you update it, this can take days or weeks. If you want to experiment with different strategies and see which works best, it might take you six months or more to reach a conclusion.
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