Eric Ollenburg

Search Engine Optimization - how it can increase your website hits and improve your business.

Ah, Search Engines are strange beasts indeed. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most valuable tools for a website.

With such things as crawlers, spiders, robots, optimizers, ranking...it can become a very big confusing sea of information. Now, when comes to Search Engine Optimization, everything counts, but the most important factor of all goes back to who the most popular kid on the playground is. Once a website has gained web chatter rich with links pointing to it, the website soars on the Search Engines like a runaway train, virtually impossible for a competitor with out major capital to infiltrate!

But, don't get discouraged, there is hope at the end of the Search Engine tunnel. Focusing on keywords, especially the less desirable ones, and blending them into your website for Search Engine Optimization, you can ride in the major website's wake and gain ranking position up to number two or three. That equals hits my friends!

When trying to position yourself for Search Engine Optimization, it's best to:

• Include Meta Tag Keywords in the "head" of your pages. Think about what audience those keywords are going to attract and also make sure they are relevant! If you input "name="Keywords" content="Cats,Cat Scratch" then your website page is about dogs, you will get a very poor ranking.
• Page Title is very important - don't name your index page "Index," if your website is about Frisbees, a Page Title for good Search Engine Optimization would be "My Frisbee Website.com - Custom Made Frisbees, Glow In The Dark Frisbees, Frisbee Golf Tournaments"
• Include an "h1" and an "h2" in the page with a website name and description with image replace rather than an image. Remember, for Search Engine Optimization, crawlers don't read images, they mean nothing to a Search Engine for ranking.
• Use "h3" tags for headers to bodies of text. That's what these header tags are for, become best buds' with them!
• Make sure the keyword is in at least the first three sentences of the first text body then throughout the rest of the text.
• Name the pages that of the keywords. For example, if you look, you will see this page is named "search-engine-optimization.php"...tricky right?
• Avoid redundancies! You will get penalized if you try to trick the crawlers and try to bend the Search Engine Optimization rules. If you write "lemon lemon lemon" ten thousand times in the page then hide the text or make it white on a white background making it invisible to the viewer, the bots' will know your trying to be a trickster and red-hat you...that means no good. You can even get kicked off the Search Engines all together. Yes, they can do that! Be be creative, be fresh, and what ever you do, mix your Search Engine Optimization skittles up like the rainbow!
• Eliminate all dead links - links that go to pages that no longer exist. This goes for external links too, avoid advertising on things where the posting expires, this confuses the Search Engine crawlers.
• Well, have you had enough? OK, let's continue...
• Be sure your website navigation is actual text not images so the Search Engine crawlers know what they are indexing as they cruise your website. You can use image-replace to get that cool button look with Search Engine Optimization persuasion.
• Avoid all Flash website design and / or website navigation unless the pages are linked with html links at the footer with the text content actually in the pages. Don't forget to include a Site Map as well - this is where all the pages within your entire website are linked from one page!

Hopefully, these tips found you in good health and help you out. Check back regularly as I will be including more Search Engine Optimization tips!