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Someone new to Internet marketing may well ask, what is SEO and why does my site need to be optimized? SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the result driven process of increasing the traffic volume or audience flow to a website via natural or organic search strategies, as opposed to using paid marketing techniques (SEM: search engine marketing). SEO can be strategically targeted toward image search or video search or the most popular usage, keyword search. Nowadays, most online companies will use SEO alone or in conjunction with other marketing tactics to draw in large audience numbers to their site. SEO may require certain HTML coding implemented, and if this is the case, it should be incorporated at the web design/web content stage. What is to be avoided is Black Hat SEO or unscrupulous methods to ensure your site gets high ranking. Black hat SEO includes article spinning, keyword stuffing and invisible text. Techniques which maintain the integrity of your site are considered 'White Hat' techniques and while they may appear to be more time consuming and resource needy, they are in fact the correct strategies to draw long term audience and ensure high SERPs (search ending results pages). Search Engines (popular examples being Google and Yahoo) work by allowing spiders to crawl the web and locate sites and pages and index them. Without aiding and assisting them by using relevant SEO tactics, it's likely that your site or page will remain buried and un-indexed. Your second priority would be to get your page as high a rank as possible. Surfers will generally not go beyond two pages worth of searching. So, what are some of the organic SEO tactics which work? Descriptive title tags and meta tags: It goes without saying that the URL of your site should be as descriptive and relevant as possible. However, your title tags and meta data should also be relevant. These use keywords to describe your site's products and services not only to your audience, but to the search engines as well. Use free keyword search sites to find out what word descriptions would work best for your site. Site accessibility: Your site needs to load well and be accessible to visitor in seconds. This means, you will need to constantly check and recheck graphics, images and file sizes to ensure they are not too large. Visitors and unfortunately, search engines too, have short attention spans. Make sure your site is quick to download and graphically and visually pleasing to the eye. High speed server: This links with the earlier point. Your site should be hosted on a high speed server to ensure it loads quickly. Given the competition you'll be facing, visitors are quick to move away from slow-loading sites. Linking (internal and reciprocal): When linking to an internal site map, ensure your links don't blog
spider navigation. By transferring your internal links to the bottom of the page, you'll give search engines an unobstructed path through your page. When using internal links, try making them keyword dense for an additional pull. If you are considering reciprocal links, try and do a search to find out high ranking relevant sites and connect to them. Captivating content: Creating captivating content will also ensure your pages get read more often. The more content-rich your site, the more likely it will be read by a larger audience and picked up by search engines. Do not get caught up however in article spinning which can result in your site getting penalized. Strong starting sentences: Begin always with strong sentences; these are the ones most important. Ensure they are audience captivating and search engine friendly. Keyword density: Your web content should be keyword rich, but avoid keyword stuffing, which is considered black hat SEO and will result in search engines giving your site a miss. A good keyword density is between 5%-8%, depending on the length of the content. So there you have it, excellent SEO tactics which are time-tested and proven to work. As with any tactics though, success does not come overnight and you will need to invest both time and energy resources if you want to get it right.
Want to use this article? You can if you include this blurb: Usha Sliva is an Online Marketing Copy Specialist and owner of Write Choice For You, a Vancouver BC based copywriting firm, specializing in online SEO marketing copy and web copy. You can contact her on Write Choice For You.
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