SEO

SEO is the process of improving the traffic to your website on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engine through natural or un-paid searches. There are two forms of SEO, On-site and Off-site. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an awesome form of marketing your website online. SEO is not an instant solution but if done correctly can generate traffic to your website that is out of this world. It takes a little time to develop so don’t expect super fast results. This form of marketing is Free if you do it yourself but is not recommended because it takes so much time to learn. Hire a internet marketing company that has a proven track record with generating lead using SEO.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the traffic to your website through Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engine through natural or un-paid searches. There are two forms of SEO, On-site and Off-site.

Content

Having good content is absolutely imperative to increase traffic to your website. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines use the content of your website to generate relevant searches for consumers. Have you ever seen a website so horrible in appearance that you questioned the credibility of the company; yet it still shows up in the top of the major search engines. Then you dig 5-10 pages back to find a beautiful website that flows well and has great images, but yet it was almost impossible to find. It’s called great content. Search engines read content not images. U.S. Image Design can help you develop great content that will get you found on the web.

Incoming Links

Having links to and from your site is very important. The more links you have the more your site will be crawled. All links aren’t created equal. Some links can actually bring the credibility of your website down. U.S. Image Design will find links that are not just relevant but highly ranked to drive your website to the top of the search engines.

Web site title

Next to having a good domain name your website title is HIGHLY impactful to search engines. Having keywords in your website is makes the difference in have a ok title or have a great one. Title length and stop words can also effects how your website is optimized.

Heading tags

Header tags use to be what search engines looked for to find the important points in a website. That is until people started to abuse them. For that reason header tags don’t hold the same weight they once did 3-5 years ago. Header tags, if used correctly can still be an excellent way to improve site optimization. U.S. Image Design can help improve your site credility by using header tags the correct way.

Internal Linking

One of the elements of site development and SEO that often gets overlooked is internal linking. When done right, you can improve both search rankings and usability. When working on improving rankings for a site, people usually try to target links from other sites (external links) that have the desired anchor text related to terms they want to rank for. However, internal links can also be effective in helping to improve a site’s rankings for targeted keyphrases.

Keyword Density

Ensuring that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic is paramount. You don’t want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it comes up often is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more then 5% of the total copy per a page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you aren’t shooting for 5% every time. It is really all about content and relevance- just make sure it is good, quality copy.

Sitemaps

It is always a good idea to give search engines a helping hand to find the content that is on your site. Making sure that you create and maintain a sitemap for all of the pages on your site will help the search robots to find all of the pages in your site and index them. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all support sitemaps and most of them offer a great way to ensure that it is finding your sitemap. Most of the time you can simply name it sitemap.xml and the search robot will find the file effectively.

Meta Tags

Everyone will tell you that meta tags don’t matter, they do. The biggest thing they matter for is click-through though. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Definitely a much overlooked (as of late) ranking factor. Getting indexed by search engines and ranking well is just the first step. The next, and biggest, step is getting that visitor that searched for your keywords to want to click on your search listing.

URL Structure

Ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important. There are various methods to make this work, such as modrewrite on apache.

Domain Name

It can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the better it is not spam and can do well in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit.