Simple Steps to Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization isn't very difficult or overly complicated. There are fairly complex tactics that can be utilized when you're in a competitive marketplace to gain an edge. Nevertheless, you can usually get away with these simple tactics and your website can start ranking much better within a couple of months.

There are two major areas that you need to focus on to be successful at SEO, on-site and off-site optimization. On-site refers to the changes you can make to your website and off-site is anything you can do to improve the quality and quantity of links that are pointing at your website. Anyone can improve upon these areas without having advanced knowledge in Search Engine Optimization.

The two most important changes you can make on your website are optimizing the Title Tag of your pages and the H1 or Header Tags. The Title Tag is what is displayed on the top left of the browser. Most of the time the Title of the page is usually the name of your website or the title of the content on the page by default. What you want to do is add important Keyword phrases in the HTML code of your website and replace the default text that is being displayed. You can find the code fairly easily by viewing the source of the page through your browser or utilizing whatever software or tools that you use to update your website. Just search for "Title" and "H1" or "H2" and you will see the phrases currently being used. Sometimes your website won't have Header tags and it is a little more difficult to add them if you're not technically inclined. Optimized Header tags are important but not the end of the world so don't worry too much about it. The Title Tag is much more important and is sometimes the only stumbling block for a website to be ranking much higher in Google and the other search engines.

When choosing Keyword phrases to add to your code you must consider the following factors. You can't just stuff a ton of Keywords into your tags because there is a limited amount of characters that Google will read and over optimizing your website can have a negative effect on your rankings. I suggest you only use 3 Keyword phrases for both the Title and H1 tags. Although each Keyword Phrase can contain up to 3 words. For example, the phrase "Online Marketing Firm" is a 3 word Keyword phrase that will help a website rank for 3 different Keyword phrases; "Online Marketing Firm", "Online Marketing" and "Marketing Firm". I would then choose two other Keyword phrases that are well optimized for other important Keywords for your business. You can separate the Keyword phrases by a hyphen or commas; "Online Marketing Firm - Internet Marketing - Interactive Agency" or "Online Marketing Firm, Internet Marketing, Interactive Agency". You can also use the same Keyword phrases for the Header tags on the same page of your website. You can follow this same tactic on every page of your website but make sure you use different Keyword phrases on each page, you don't want to keep using the same ones all the time and you want to rank for more phrases. Just make sure you use the most important and competitive phrases on the homepage because it is your most powerful.

Optimizing the quality and quantity of links to your website is a little more complicated and the most overlooked aspect of SEO. Google considers this to be the 2nd most important factor on who ranks at the top of their search results. The algorithm that made Google famous was so advanced when it was created because of this very factor. There are some simple things you can do to improve upon this area.

The most common and basic tactic is submitting your website into Directories such as the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ. Yahoo costs money but it is one of the places Google uses to crawl the Internet to find websites and receiving a link from a popular website will always be helpful. DMOZ is free but a volunteer organization and many have trouble getting their website submitted successfully. You can give it a try but don't worry if your website doesn't get in. There are many other Directories out there that are also helpful and especially ones that are related to your business. There are also ways to get links from Blogs for a reasonable fee such as through services like Blogitive and Pay Per Post. Another thing you can do is get links from local government websites such as your town or local business groups, links from these websites are extremely powerful. Just make sure, if you can, to have them use your Keyword phrases in the text that is hyperlinked to your website.

If you follow these tactics you can easily increase your rankings in all the search engines, especially Google. Don't think these simple changes won't have that much of an impact because they will.