The Importance of Search Engine Optimization

There's so much rubbish spouted online regarding search engine optimization, why you should do it and how much people can charge you to optimize your site.

I suggest; if you are building your own site, optimize it yourself, if you are having your site built by a tech company ensure they optimize your site for you at the time of construction, this will save you so much time, and for the time it takes you or your technical team its well worth the extra effort.

So, what is search engine optimization and why do you need it?

Search engines need to recognize your website, and they do this by what is known as 'Spidering.' When a search engine spiders your site it's looking for specifics. Those specifics are keywords and phrases that relate to your website and the content within. Optimizing your site correctly ensures that you are feeding the spiders the very food they love and you should start with your heading and sub-heading.

Your main keywords and or phrases should be included within the title tags of your website and again within your sub-heading tags

Ensure your keywords accurately describe the content of your site, but please don't go over-board; two or three of your main keywords are all it takes. If you have a comprehensive list of keywords to work with ensure you only use the main ones and always the name of your business.

Always include some of your keywords within the content of your home page but don't go crazy or you may be accused of keyword spamming and be penalised by the search engines.

Ensure you include your main keywords in the first and the last paragraphs of the text on your homepage and evenly disperse them throughout your text and on any subsequent pages.

If you have any images on your site also make sure that they are tagged with pertinent keywords.

The other, and probably the most important area is your content. You may have heard the phrase 'Content is King' believe it, the search engines love content, and they love content to change, so if you have an information type website update your content on a regular basis.

If your website isn't information based and you are selling specific products, regularly change the description of the products, a simple slight change is all it takes to make the spiders think that your content is changing and they will visit and index your site more often if it appears to them that the content has altered.

This is very important, if you cannot see a way of adding fresh content or re-arranging the existing content then you must take immediate steps to remedy this situation.

If you are unable to optimize your site yourself and you haven't got a technical team to do it for you, you may need to engage a specialized company to carry this process out for you.

I am not recommending a company but I do advise you not to accept the cheapest available, and do some in-depth research or follow a recommendation from someone you know and trust to avoid being scammed by a company that basically doesn't have a clue.

Please note; there are thousands of them that won't do a good job and very few that will, so if you can, do it yourself. Remember as an absolute minimum, your keywords should be in your filename, heading (i.e. page title) and in the first and last paragraph of your web page.

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