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How to Optimize Your Website

SEO best practices to improve traffic

Penny Schneck -- Furniture Today, July 27, 2009

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Search Engine Optimization can be an effective way to naturally deliver traffic to your content. Whether the content type is a picture, video or an article there are Search Engine Optimization best practices that can be easily put into place. Once these best practices have been implemented your content will be better positioned to place higher on the search engine results page.

Search Engines disperse web crawlers to your site in order to view the content available. After visiting your site the crawlers send back certain attributes about the pages it has crawled. This information is then interpreted and ranked based upon an algorithm. While each search engine utilizes an algorithm to generate content rankings, they each vary from one another. For example, the algorithm that Google.com uses to determine its rankings will vary from Bing.com and Yahoo.com. This is due to the fact that each search engine's algorithm looks at various components of the page with a different value.

The proprietary algorithm is something that the search engine companies will never completely release to the public. However, we do know that the following Top 10 SEO Tips, as shown below, can assist you in obtaining higher rankings.

Top 10 SEO Tips

1. Meta Keywords
• Select approximately 7 keywords that are very relevant to the content on the page.

2. Meta Title
• Enrich your titles with keywords. Keep them straight forward and avoid using a twist or play on words. Maintain a character length of 66 characters.

3. Meta Description
• Incorporate your keywords here and be descriptive about the content on the page. Attempt to keep the description brief and around 165 characters.

4. Alt Tags
• This is a tag used to define what an image is about. Select keywords to define the image and provide a brief description.

5. Anchor Text
• This is the text that contains the link. It is recommended to select keywords as the anchor text.

6. Link out to relevant content
• When linking to exterior websites it is best to have the link point to content of very similar nature.

7. Site Map
• An effective way to inform search engines about pages on websites that are available for crawling.

8. Robots.txt File
• If there is content that is not to be crawled and shown on a search engine's results page then include the file directory in a Robots.txt file.

9. Submit your site to directories (i.e., www.dmoz.org)
• This allows for search engines to know that the submitted domain exists and to begin crawling it.

10. Incorporate keywords into your content
• Place keywords throughout your content. However, avoid the practice of keyword stuffing. This is where keywords are overused and appear too often.

By taking into account these Top 10 Tips you will be taking the necessary steps towards content optimization.

Resources:
www.websitegrader.com: Just plug in your URL and see how your site's optimization compares to others! Websitegradder provides easy instructions on how to improve each aspect of your SEO.

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