The radical shift from traditional media of marketing to Internet marketing has left many bewildered regarding interaction with potential customers. With competition getting fiercer with every passing day, a company’s website has become a way of presenting itself to the world.
All top most companies today take help of search engine marketing tools so that they can get a better ranking in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. In fact, it is crucial for a website to remain in the top 10 positions because viewers hardly go beyond the first page. And SEO helps you in bringing your site closer to your prospects.
What exactly do we mean when we say Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is the process of developing and analyzing individual web pages and the entire website so that they get a good ranking in the major search engines. It helps to create a website in such a way that it can be easily read by the search engine crawler.
Onpage optimization is the first step of SEO. It refers to what can be done on the pages of a website for getting a better ranking. It includes the following processes:
Title Optimization – A site’s title tag is a crucial element. It is the first thing that search engines show and provides a glimpse of the website content. A title tag has dual purposes to fulfill. It must be eye-catching so that the searcher feels tempted to know more about the site. At the same time, it must be informative enough so that the search engine ranks it above thousands of other similar websites.
An ideal title tag should include name of the business. Including right kind of keywords is important – e.g., a pizza company can get good responses if it includes keywords like order pizza, home delivery pizza etc in the title tag. It is evident that people will be typing these words when they want to order pizza online.
Meta Tags Optimization – This involves providing a brief description of the website. It usually focuses on the areas and services in which the business specializes. It must be interesting so that the searcher wants to know more about the site. For example, a person selling ‘cheap web hosting’ can include phrases like “hosting starting from only $0.99” in their Meta tags to get higher number of visitors because the description fits perfectly with what the users want.
Keyword Optimization – Selecting the right keywords is an important step in SEO. The number of keywords that is put in the content helps the search engines to determine if it is a relevant website or not. Stuffing the site with too many keywords is a taboo. It is a deceptive practice and search engines consider it as spamming. So maintaining a balance between the keywords and relevant content is important.
Link Optimization – Link optimization or link popularity refers to the process of achieving back links. However, make sure the sites that back link your website are relevant and reputed and have higher page rank. Reciprocal link exchange and getting one-way links are the best ways for link optimization.
The field of SEO is vast and SEO experts have to keep themselves updated with the new technologies and current market trends. So the next time you see a high ranking page in Google search, remember that it is the result of painstaking research and great efforts by an SEO expert.
