Optimizing your Website

You have created a brand spanking new website full of exciting features and information relating to your services. Now What??

The most important part of a successful online business and website is to generate enough traffic to the site. Without sufficient traffic to your website you will not be able to own and manage a profitable online business. It is at this stage that you will become familiar with the terms "search engine optimization (SEO)", "website optimization", "on-page optimization" and "off-page optimization".

The aim of this article is to provide you with a brief overview of the available options, useful hints and hopefully a better understanding of what you can do to optimize and promote your website.

Website Optimization  

You will need to ensure that your website features high on the search results from searches conducted through the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN). There are some very important areas that you need to be familiar with to ensure effective optimization of your website.

These key areas are:

• Determining the correct keywords and keyword phrases to use in your website (on-page SEO).
• Researching your competitors and the popularity of searches on your keywords to ensure that you make use of effective keywords that you can realistically compete on (on-page SEO).
• Designing your website around these keywords and ensuring that your site is search engine friendly (on-page SEO).
• Obtaining links from trusted highly ranked websites with similar but not competing content (off-page SEO).
• Submitting your website URL to directories (off-page SEO).
• Writing articles about your website/business/services/products with links back to your website and submitting these articles to article sites on the web (off-page SEO).
• Posting articles/comments on blogs with links back to your website (off-page SEO).
• Registering on social sites (Face Book, Twitter) and promoting your website on these sites (off-page SEO).

There are many more areas that you will need to take into account but the above key areas will go a long way towards ensuring your success.

Helpful Hints 

• If you are serious about optimizing and marketing your website correctly, it is advisable to make use of a website marketing/optimizing company. There are many companies providing SEO services that advertise on the web.
•  Do a lot of research prior to designing/optimizing your website. It is time consuming and it can be costly to rectify mistakes.
• Audit your site bi-monthly to tract your ranking, links and optimization. You can outsource this function or you can buy the software from a SEO company.
• Keep an eye on what your competitors are up to.
• There are no ethical shortcuts. If you make use of illegal or black hat tactics your website could end-up being suspended by the search engines. These tactics include link farms, links to dodgy sites, submitting the same article to hundreds of sites or too many new links in a short time to name but a few.

Hopefully you found this article helpful and informative. Good luck with reaching the #1 spot!!