SEO basics

Have you ever created a successful website and tried to market it, but nobody ever looked at it? As a website owner or designer, it critical that you optimize your website so that it appears on or near the first page of a search engine results page for important keywords.

It isn’t about flashy, beautiful graphics and a wonderfully designed site anymore, because no matter how beautiful your page is, you won’t be guaranteed any visitors. No, these days, it’s all about SEO—search engine optimization. SEO is the key to getting your website noticed.

Many website owners hire SEO Firms (search engine optimization firms) to optimize their websites for them. No SEO firm has any special relationship with Google or Yahoo! — and if they claim they do, then it’s likely to be a scam. Also beware of SEO firms that promise to make your website #1 on the search results page (SERP) when you enter a certain keyword or set of keywords. There is no way to guarantee that your site will be first to show up on the first page, so be cautious.

The first thing to pay attention to about your website is the domain name. Before you even purchase the domain name for your website, you should start thinking about search engine optimization and consider how it might help your website.

First, you need to pick the keyword or keywords that you’re going to optimize your site for—but don’t just pick any set of words that are relevant; pick a set of keywords that you think that someone will be likely to type into a search engine bar when searching for your site or company. For instance, it is likely that nobody will ever type in something like “SEO chocolate”, because those are unrelated keywords, while “SEO keywords” might be a popular search phrase. Try to aim for the popular search phrases—the more people searching, the more chances that some of them will hit your website.

When you pick your domain name, it’s good to have your SEO keyword(s) in the domain name if you can because the search engine will notice that your domain name has the words and give you credit for that. Of course, this is not always possible.

While many factors influence the search engine results pages (SERPs) having keywords in your domain or file names will help. And, that will put your site higher on the results list.

If you’re going to optimize keywords for a subpage of your website, be sure to label your subfolder with your chosen keywords so that the search engine programs that are indexing your page see that the keyword is in your folder name—this helps with the SEO of your site for those keywords.

The program will then parse through all of your site’s text, and when it finds several instances of your optimized keyword in there, it will better relate your website to the keyword. Thus, you can guarantee that you will at least appear when someone types in the keyword you optimized. Search engines are now highly intelligent on how they relate keywords to pages and sites, and full SEO guidelines are beyond the scope of this article.

There is no guarantee as to what page you’ll appear on even if you optimize. It pays to focus on niches and develop keywords around them too. Getting to page one of Google for “lawyer” is a lot harder than “lawyer texas”. It pays to find a niche (or several niches) that have been previously under-utilized — take advantage of it using search engine optimization for those keywords.