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So you’ve got your web hosting all sorted out and your site uploaded, and now it’s time to go about performing some basic SEO (search engine optimization) to help get yours site ascending in the engines. Most of the time when this is talked about, it’s referring to getting well-ranked in Google. When Bing absorbs Yahoo sometime in 2010 it will account for around 30% of the search market, a not an insignificant number. For now, we’ll concentrate on what Google prefers, as they will still be top dog for some time to come.
There are basically two parts to SEO for your site, on-page and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO refers to the links and other attention your site gets from other sites around the Web. This can include inbound links to your site, and the text that is used to create that link (called “anchor text”). The words surrounding these links matter, as does the type of sites that they emanate from. This has to do with relevance. All links count and matter, but some matter more than others.
For instance links for .gov or .edu sites, particularly from “authority” sites in your niche, will help you a great deal. Links for sites with higher PageRank (that aren’t saddled with a “no-follow” tag) also pump up your links reputation.
Other ways of attaining good off-page SEO include using blog commenting to drop links, along with forum posts, directory submissions, article marketing, press releases, classified ads, Web 2.0 sites and social networking sites. These are all good places to work on your off-page SEO by dropping links in them.
On-page SEO factors include items like the title tag of your pages, the keywords used and where they are used, the quality and quantity of your content, the navigation of your site, the quality of your site’s code, your page descriptions, your tags, the internal linking structure of your site and more.
These items added up will give the engines a (hopefully) clear picture of just what your site is about, a big step in getting ranked for your chosen keyword terms.
A word here about the keyword research that you do when launching and developing your new site — hopefully you will have taken some time and determined not only the appropriate niche keywords that you can be ranked for, and not merely chosen the ones with the greatest number of searches. A new site needs a fighting chance, and going after a one or two word keyword that has many millions of pages competing against you does you no good.
Opt instead for several good “longtail” keywords that are relevant to your market. Longtail keywords are terms that get decent traffic, but are less competitive. They are typically 3-5 word phrases. An example might be instead of using “home mortgage”, you might choose a phrase like “home mortgage loan Orlando Florida”.
This will not only be easier to get your pages ranked, but will also help your overall site relevance and eventually make getting rankings for some of those harder keywords possible down the road.
Doing basic SEO requires large dollops of both on-page and off-page SEO. Make sure to include both as you develop your site.
