Search Engine Optimization Tips
There are many search engine marketing companies that are
passing themselves of as search engine optimization companies and will
guarantee you they will get you ranked number one on Google.
They are full off it! There is no way to guarantee a number one position
on any of the search engines for any amount of money. Refer to our
search engine marketing versus
search engine optimization page for an explanation of the
differences. The best way to ensure a high ranking with the search
engines in order of importance is to have good quality content, a
popular website (which means a large number of back links), and one that
is free of code errors. There are numerous other factors that help with
website search engine ranking and any good web developer or SEO company
will know about them.
Good Quality Content
For proper search engine optimization (SEO) the most
important thing is to have good original content. I can not
stress this enough. Each page of your website should pertain to only one
keyword or concept. Each page that deals with a keyword or concept needs
at minimum 250 to 500 words of text. Depending on the competition for
your keywords you may need substantially more text. This basically means
that you need to write an essay devoted to the keyword or concept of the
web page just like you did in English 101. A good SEO company or web
developer can help with suggestions as to what the content should be on
what pages and you should consult with one but they are not experts
about your business, you are!
Back Links
The second most important thing to have for proper SEO is a
large number of back links to your site. The number of other
websites linking to your site affects your search engine ranking. The
greater the number of links to your site indicates to the search engines
the popularity of your site. If there are two websites with essentially
the same content the one with more inbound links will be ranked higher.
The number of websites you are competing with dictates how many inbound
links you need, at minimum it should be at least 100. The quality of
the links is important also. For instance Google ignores links from
Yahoo's business directory. The best links to have are from websites
that are similar to your own. If you have a carpet cleaning company the
best inbound links would be from other carpet cleaning companies. Of
course if the reciprocal links are from competitors in your area then
they would be useless. However, links from carpet cleaning companies in
other states would be very beneficial.
Free of Code Errors
The third important thing is to have a site that the search engines
can actually index. The pages should be error free. While many types of
page errors will not cause a problem with the search engine robots,
there are many that will.
The W3C Markup Validation Service is an excellent resource to check
web pages for errors. Pages can and should have text hyperlinks.
JavaScript and Flash menus can not be followed by the search engines and
the over use of them will cause pages to load slowly. Slow loading pages
can cause the search engine robots to ignore the page and they are also
irritating to human visitors to your site.
There are
numerous other factors that help with search engine optimization and
McGrath Electronics, Inc. can assist you with them.
Please see our
SEO Services page for details and pricing.