Wednesday, June 24, 2009

How To Optimize Your Website

By Justin Harrison

The internet has opened up markets that firms and individuals could not previously reach with ease. With a website, you are able to market and sell your product or service on the internet without much hassle and cost. If you have built a website to target these previously unreachable customers, you have to optimize it so that the customers can find it. Just having a website will not guarantee you customers. This is why search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered.

It is all about keeping the search engines happy. In other words, your website must follow most of the protocols in the search algorithm. The better your website can follow them, the more are the chances of it getting indexed and ranked higher in the SERPs. Although the algorithms used by the search engines are different, they more or less follow the same set of protocols. When you optimize your website for these algorithms, you are doing nothing but SEO.

You need not make huge monetary investments to get your SEO program going. You could hire an SEO expert or tie up with a firm, to get all your SEO work done. Doing SEO on your own is another very good idea. It is very easy to learn the tips and tricks of SEO. Once you have decided to do your SEO yourself, you would spend absolutely no money for your SEO campaign. You are not supposed to pay any money to the search engines for ranking your website higher.

Your ultimate goal is to get the traffic flowing into your website, and the same can be achieved with SEO. You can get the traffic either through search engines or through a network of back links. SEO is responsible for both these means of getting the traffic.

Apart from using keywords, you should also consider link building when optimizing your website. Link the pages of your website to pages of other websites that are in the same industry as you. This will make your website to be ranked highly. Ensure that the websites you link to also link back to you as search engines look at the number of quality backlinks your website has when ranking it. Moreover, you can write articles related to your niche and submit them to article directories. This is a good way of increasing traffic and backlinks to your website. Participating in forums and blogs will also increase your backlinks and traffic as well.

Some of the established companies do not invest time and money into SEO, for they do not find it lucrative. They choose different methods such as PPC. However, SEO is worth a try, if you have the time and commitment to do it. If you have the same, then your answer to the question, ?is SEO the right choice?? should be 'yes'.

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