Search Engine Optimization Guide

Building a website from scratch is not only time consuming, but it’s also very demanding on the little gray cells of the brain. Once completed though you want to know it’s doing well and so you’ll probably spend at least a minute of two every day checking the statistics page that often comes as a package with your chosen website building software. You wait, and you wait, but you see very little traffic, even though you’ve advertised the site on your Facebook page, through your Twitter stream and maybe even with a Google Adwords campaign. When trying to rank for a difficult term like San Diego SEO, it is important to research the competition to reverse engineer that the top competitors are doing.

Does this sound familiar?

If you’re reading this, then it probably does, and you probably want to know about SEO and how it can make your new website a success.

Website Content

The first thing to look at with regards to SEO is your actual website content. Did you spend enough time researching your keywords before jumping in and writing your content? Can your website content be accused of being more keywords than informative content? Can the sentences and paragraphs you’ve written be read by a human and still make sense or have you written primarily for search engine bots?

When Google Panda was implemented in 2011, the methods used by search engines to look at website content changed dramatically. Today not only does your website content need to have good SEO, but it also needs to be well written and informative to a reader. It also needs to be updated on a regular basis, so simply launching a website and letting it sit for months on end will not help your SEO or your search engine rankings.

For your website to be a success, then it needs to have good quality written content that helps visitors to answer a question or find a product. It also needs to contain a selection of keywords that are related to your service/products and that internet users are constantly looking for, and it needs fresh content on a regular basis…maybe though the use of a blog page.

Linking

When it comes to SEO, linking is critical. The more quality links you have to other websites the more important and authoritative your website looks to a search engine bot/spider. Note the word ‘quality’ though, as search engines are now very good at spotting spam links to random sites, and they will drop your ranking or ban your website altogether if spotted.

So how do you create links to other sites to improve your SEO? One dominate Orange County SEO company recommends to write informative articles that are then submitted to a specialized submission site before being distributed to hundreds of article directories. If the editor of a particular directory likes your work, they will publish it, along with an author bio and a link to your website.

Another way is to write guest blog posts for websites that are in the same general niche as yours. Again you add an author bio and a link to your website so that readers can visit if they want to. Links aren’t difficult to create, but you do need to write quality articles and blog posts in the first place. Writing and submitting content-farmed work, or work that is largely taken from other websites, will not get you published, and without publication, your links will never be seen.

Social Media

Social media is the new big thing regarding SEO, and a quality SEO campaign just isn’t complete without it. Firstly you need to create a Facebook page separate to your personal page where you can post news, adverts, special offers and other interesting items about your business. You’ll also benefit from creating other social media accounts, such as a Twitter account, a Google Plus account, a Digg account and a LinkedIn profile page.

In fact, it makes sense to join as many social media sites as you possibly can.Adding ‘Share’ buttons to each of your website pages is also a good idea as this quickly creates a way in which your content can be shared with your business contacts, customers and hopefully their friends. The more ‘shares’ that a search engine bot associated with your website, the more important it looks, and the better your ranking becomes. For SEO purposes these little buttons, also known as widgets, are a vital addition and one that doesn’t take long to create.