Internet: Search Engine Optimization - A Do-It-Yourself Guide for the Small Business Owner

Search Engine Optimization - A Do-It-Yourself Guide for the Small Business Owner

Written by Colleen Happ

So your company has a website – an important step to validate your company, boost its visibility and increase its sales. Now how do you get it to show up on Google and repparttar

other search engines like Yahoo and MSN?

A high search engine ranking for your website is essential. At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on repparttar 142870 internet find them through search engines.

To increase your website’s ranking on search engines, you could hire a company to do it for you. There is a whole search engine optimization (SEO) industry that will gladly take your money. SEO is simpler than it is made out to be, and there are several steps that you can do yourself to increase repparttar 142871 rank of your website.

1. The content of your website is key. Search engines check to see if search words appear close to repparttar 142872 top of repparttar 142873 page and their frequency on repparttar 142874 page. You must first determine what repparttar 142875 key words that your customers search with. Consider repparttar 142876 website from repparttar 142877 perspective of a potential customer and try to understand what they would be searching for on repparttar 142878 web. Aim to have 100-250 words on each page with those key words used as often as possible. Those same key words should be included in repparttar 142879 title tag of your coding, but keep it to six words or less. (this is repparttar 142880 coloured bar at repparttar 142881 top of repparttar 142882 page). The site at http://www.related-pages.com/seoTools.aspx?cb=wgyr has some great tools to help you optimize key words.

2. Link Popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in search engine rank. Almost all of repparttar 142883 search engines use link popularity to rank websites. Inbound links matter most, and highly ranked sites linking to your site are worth more that lower ranked sites. If you can provide content that other sites want to link to, you will move up in repparttar 142884 rankings. This means that you may have to actively solicit links to your content and perhaps write articles for other websites.

3. Proper Page Structure. This can be tricky for people who don’t know HTML, but it really isn’t that complicated. Your pages should be coded correctly so they are easier for repparttar 142885 search engines to index. Your site should have easy to follow text navigation, and you should avoid using Flash to build your entire page because it makes repparttar 142886 site harder to index. If you want dynamics on your page generated by other languages such as JavaScript, you should have these codes in external files. There is also an html validation tool at http://validator.w3.org/ that is useful. Errors in programming code and incorrect html can keep repparttar 142887 search engine robots from indexing your web pages. Keep coding clean and simple.

Blogging can run your entire web site

Written by Graham Jones

Blogging is a term that means different things to different people. To some people it means keeping an online journal. To others blogging is about creating a community of people who can contribute to a growing discussion on a specific topic. To me, however, blogging is about creating and running an entire web site. That's because blogging can actually be used as a complete content management system for almost any web site.

There are several reasons why you should consider using blog pages to run your entire web site. These include:

* You can make changes to your web site content without repparttar need for specialist software

* You can make changes to your content from anywhere you can access repparttar 142759 web; you don't need to be at your PC.

* You can make changes to content quickly – more quickly than with software.

* You can make changes to content without incurring cost – unlike using a web design agency.

* You can use blogs to create content with colleagues, working as a team – something that's more difficult and more costly with software.

All of these benefits can be obtained free of charge using Blogger.com to run your pages. To use Blogger.com as a content management system, take repparttar 142760 following steps:

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