SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
submit - submit your website to Google manually, only do this once you know you’re happy with it. Go to “About Google” then “Submit your content”
linking - make sure your website is linked from other websites. one would be yahoo local or superpages etc.
niche - use keywords, metatags, etc that are as specific as possible which helps google determine relevance of your site. have the main title/theme of your website in just about every keyword
long tail keywords (a search phrase) - keywords of 3 words or longer that typically are a phrase such as “thousand oaks carpet cleaning”. these are more specific and more relevance. this does not bring lots of traffic, but it does bring very targeted traffic. (the more common the phrase, the less optimized for search engines)
content - Make sure your wording in the text includes your keywords. The keywords should be closer to the top of the section to maximize effectiveness. Different pages of your website should focus on different phrases but maintain overall theme. Google actually creates a description of your website from the content, not just meta section.
content extras - include help pages, information pages, calculator, tips page, blog, free forum
keyword placement - meta description, meta keywords, page titles, alt tags, header tags, body text, link anchor text, website navigation, folder names, page names, file names. WARNING: do not overuse your keywords or your website might get labelled as spam.
In other words, don’t repeat your keywords over and over in the same place.
Google Analytics - a free program to help you analyze your website customers.
Google Sitemaps - another tool monitoring the performance of your website
WebCEO.com - another free website optimization tool. You can retrieve keywords from your competitors website and compare with yours.
Wordtracker - a leading keyword research tool. Remember niche is more important than words that show tons of hits. You want keywords with low competition.
Competition - you can go to your competitors websites and see what keywords they use, and only use the ones appropriate to your product or service.
Backward Links - under “page info” of a right-click to see who is linking to your competitor. This will help you know what kind of sites want to link to your type of site. Again, use as appropriate to your site. You want as many sites linking to yours as possible to improve page rank. You can request a link from these sites by filling out a form in many cases, but make sure it sounds personal. Tell why linking to your site is good for their visitors. (Mutual linking of your site and another works too.) btw, don’t buy links since google might penalize you for this.
info.vilesilencer.com - download via excel for directory linking
images, videos - make sure you include text in your site near the picture or video that describes it. The filename and alt attribute should be descriptive, since search engine spiders can see these. filenames - Use good descriptive filenames for your images.
video - using videos gives you higher rankings in search engines. Posting on youtube or metacafe can help too, but having videos most important.
webpage names - instead of using “about.html” you could use “about-carpet-cleaning” which impacts relevance.
301 redirect - use this to help search engines when changing webpage names.
dynamic sites - with many products, the meta tags and meta titles should be product specific. in other words, they should be updated with the content.
Frames and Flash - this content is very hard for search engines. Use sparingly. Flash images are okay, but don’t do the entire site in flash.
breadcrumb trail - another feature that makes navigation of large sites easier and help with SEO. This is not too important for smaller websites. (use relevant keywords here as possible) Putting the trail along the bottom of the website in small print makes sense.
blog - a blog always helps traffic, and helps SEO if it is relevant and focused.
RSS - your blog probably has RSS incorporated. if you update your website frequently, website RSS feed can be submitted to http://pingomatic.com
Spamming - always bad. Google might find you out and penalize you.
Deep links - a link to a page other than your home page. These are good to use in Press releases, Forums, etc. Make sure they are relevant.
articlesender.com, ezinearticles.com - submit articles with deep links, don’t sales pitch on these, make it relevant and interesting to create interest. Do these when you create new info/video content on your site.
PR Web - probably the best site to use, but it costs money. A catchy title is most important.
hubpages.com, squidoo.com - good to use and indirectly promote your site. worth looking into at least.
testimonials - you want testimonials on your website, i’ve seen them called “kudos” and other things. you could have one page dedicated to this (testimonial page or kudos page), as well as some on your home page.