Keys To Optimizing Your Site.

The way your website ranks in the search engines is one of the most important factors for a successful business. Approximately 95% of the traffic to your web site could come from the search engines. Not taking advantage of these resources could cost your business dearly. Nobody who is seriously interested in having a successful website business would ignore such a rich source of traffic.

For most people however, optimizing their website for search engines is a daunting task. There are so many factors to be considered, that the average web master gets overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the task.

Some of the most important items to look at for proper optimization are:

- Keywords
- Meta Tags
- Page Titles
- In- and outbound Links
- Content

Keywords are the words that describe the main theme or purpose of your website. The more strategically they are placed within the web pages, the better the search engines like your site. Therefore, it is best to incorporate these keywords in areas such as:

- Page Title
- Meta Tags
- Throughout the body of the web page
- Header Tags
- Alt-Tags of Images

The most important area to place your keywords is the page title, as the search engines normally display your page title in the short description that shows up in the search results next to the link to your page. This is often the only information people get to make a decision on whether your site is worth looking at during their current search.

Although the importance of the meta tags has decreased considerably, it is still worth your while to set them up properly. Many search engines still take these meta tags into consideration, and since these tags are part of the original website design format, and quite simple to set up, it would be advisable to include them in the site design with the right keywords.

It is also very important that your keywords appear throughout the text or content of your pages. The relevance of the content to the main theme of the site is a major factor in determining how your site will be ranked in the search engines.

The content should have good “keyword-density”, but intentionally flooding the site with such keywords (e.g. writing tons of them in the same color as the background so that people won’t see them but search engines do) will actually adversely affect your ranking, and may get your site banned altogether.

Each page of the website should have its own heading, and the more the header tags and the page titles resemble each other, the more the search engines like it. Particularly when the different pages have a different focus.

An often-overlooked way to properly insert keywords is to incorporate them into the alt-tags of the images that are displayed on the various pages. Alt-tags used to be more important when people had very slow connections to the Internet and were more or less forced to turn off the downloading of the images to speed things up a bit. This is not so important any more, as most people have reasonable to very fast connections, but these alt-tags are still handy to have and will aid in the rankings if properly configured.

The links on the pages, both internal and external, should have some of the keywords incorporated in them as well. Internal links are quite manageable, but the external links can become quite tricky with reference to your own keywords. Having links to affiliate programs or sites with the same focus as your own could help tremendously in the ranking process.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the areas where optimization may be applied. To do a really thorough job, one should call upon the assistance of some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software. Such software could save you weeks and weeks of work. Such programs perform a myriad of functions with a much greater accuracy than if everything had to be done by hand. In most instances they provide options or point to areas of optimization, which you may not even had thought of.

The benefits these tools provide can be measured both in considerable time saving, as well as in increased traffic, which ultimately translates into increased business.
Bill Stafford has been operating a computer sales and support company for over 20 years. For more information and tips for your PC or the Internet, visit his site at: 
http://inforesources.wordpress.com/