Designing a site to be Search Engine Friendly

The basic idea of owning a site is to have people visit your site to purchase whatever you are selling, promoting, or whatever. The best way to accomplish this is to design your site to be Search Engine Friendly.

Basic Methods for Make a Site Search Engine Friendly

Lets start off with some basic methods of making your site both visitor and search engine friendly.

* The site needs to be easy to use, easy to navigate and have what your visitors are looking for. Do not promise something that you do not have.
* The site should be visually attractive, do not use overly bright colors or colors that do not go together.
* Have ways for your visitors to navigate through your site. Provide navigation links in a consistent way throughout your site. For example, if on the first 3 pages, the navigation links are on the left hand side, ensure that the navigation links are on the left hand side throughout the rest of the site.
* Identify what your site is about on your homepage. Be honest!
* Keep the home page simple. Limit navigation links on the home page to major ideas or areas of your site.
* Keep keywords to a limited level on the home page. Search engines take this seriously and will penalize your website for key word spamming.
* Use an opening paragraph to explain what your site is doing or about, keep this to around 250 words (this should be as close to your HTML code as possible). Within this paragraph, use keywords in a way that makes sense to your visitor. Do not over due the keywords. If you use them correctly, search engines will see your site as a subject matter expert and give you a higher page ranking.
* Each page of your site should have a page title with roughly 60- 80 characters. This helps search engines to see and identify each page separately.
* Give each page a page tag with roughly 20 to 25 characters; this helps both your visitor and search engines to see what your page is about.
* Use anchor text links with caution. We recommend that you use text links only if they are help or necessary to your visitor for navigation or to find useful information. Excessive use of text links can reduce your page rank.
* Underline, bold, highlight, and italic keywords; however, this should be done where it make sense. Do not overdue it.
* Optimize your site for keywords prior to submitting your site to the search engines. We will explain later what search engines require.
* Always use correct English and grammar within your site. Both your visitors and search engines always appreciate a website with good grammar and proper English.

Designing your site to be search engine friendly is not hard; however, it takes time and effort. As long as you use patience, be methodical, do keyword research, create unique content, provide what your visitors are looking for, then both your traffic and your search engine ranking will improve.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Before we get much further in this series, it is important that you understand what Black Hat SEO is. While these techniques can get you short term results, they come with a very high proability that your site will get banned from search engines and they should be avoided.

Most black hat SEO techniques used to be legal, but poeple went overboard. As a result, Black hat techniques are frowned upon. Black hat SEO is a short term method of getting visitors to your site without looking at how to get a large volume of visitors to your site on a regular basis. These techniques are often used by people promising great results in a short time. They do not care if you get banned down the road, so be careful of people offering traffic using these techniques.

Black Hat SEO Techniques:

* Keyword stuffing: Placing a large number of keywords into your site. This includes long lists of keywords and nothing else. Search engines will eventually pick up on this and penalize your site. We will show you the correct way on how to place keywords into your site that will be helpful.
* Invisible Keywords: This involves placing key words within the site that are the same color as the background (making them invisible to humans but not to search engine spiders). Of course, in the long run, search engines will figure this out and penalize your site.
* Doorway Pages: A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

Black Hat SEO techniques actually work in the short run; however, in time, sites using these techniques are banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk.

What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

SEM is marketing a site with a search engine. Whether you are trying to improve page rank with organic listings, purchasing paid links or a combination of both then you are involved in search engine marketing. Search engine marketing can be very expensive. You will need to use paid to click programs and/or paid per impression programs.

So what does this really mean or work? Well, lets try an example, type in any group of words with lets say "money" in it. If you look at the list that the search engine gives you, the first section that you see is "sponsor results". They are up on top; and, they got there because they PAID for it. The list below these sponsored results are from organic traffic and are not based on paid links or ads.

All search engines now days have a way for you to purchase these sponsored slots, but they are expensive. Are they worth it? Only you can determine if the cost of these spots are worth the expense. Most people starting out in website marketing feel that SEM cost more per conversion than it is worth. However, SEM will get people to your site, but only your site can turn that traffic into a sale. A fact that you need to consider and remember when using SEM is that you pay for your ad no matter if you make a sale or not.

We have commissioned a large article series on SEO and will be posting an article every few days. To get an update automatically, subscribe to this blog.

Search engine optimization (SEO) introduction

Website optimization is the key to developing a long term profitable website. It does not matter what you are selling or what you are pushing. Every site wants to reach the customers looking for its products or services.
These customers come from various sources:

1. Search engines
2. Paid to click (PTC) programs
3. Traffic exchange sites or similar programs.
4. Word of mouth, printed ads and television ads.

Search Engine Result Page (SERP's) are the best for providing a cost effective and highier conversion rate than the other three by far. Not only are SERP's more productive, but they are FREE.

70 to 85% of people going to any site will get there through a search engine. With this in mind, don't you think you should consider how to get those search engines to send that traffic to you!

When people look for something on the web, they almost always go to some type of search engine and type in the key words. They will get the results listed on a page. Almost all of these people will pick a site from the first page that comes up. Sometimes, they will move to the 2nd or 3rd page. What does this tell you? Well, that if you are not on those first couple of pages, you are not going to get a big piece of the traffic pie. And why do you want the piece of the pie? Traffic means customers which equates to MONEY. This is where SEO or Search Engine Optimization comes into play.

We have commissioned a large article series on SEO and will be posting an article every few days. To get an update automatically, subscribe to this blog.