Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Optimize your Website for Google

There are things that you can do to help your website get a better ranking with search engines like Google before you even begin to advertise. The following five steps are probably the most important to consider. Google is not very particular about fancy grapics and colors you use, or about the exact words used to describe your messages to your audience. However the bots do want you to show relevancy in topics through your website.

Step 1:
You should almost definitaly design your website in CSS. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which are basically just written instructions for how the site is presented to your visitors. Not only do Google, and other search bot style engines adore CSS, but once you are used to using it you will as well, since it allows you to update the text appearance of your entire site with very little effort.

Step 2:
Keep your site design pretty simple. You really will not impress most visitors with super fancy designs and flashy videos. On Google's side these are computerized visitors, not human traffic. Many people feel that audio or video that play' s when you open a page is annoying. Get their attention first, then show off the fun stuff.

Step 3:
Meta Tags should definitely be used, but don't rely on them to raise your page rank. Meta tags aren't used all that much anymore. Google mainly uses Meta Tags, such as your Title, Description, and Keyword tags to correctly index your site and put it in the right category.

Step 4:
Don't use giant files that take forever to load. Using big files on your site will slow it down and cause both the robots and your precious traffic to leave before ever seeing your product or message. There are many ways to optimize your images and compress all of your files, so make sure you give the visitor a quick and easily download able page.

Step 5:
Check your links often. The Google bots are advanced technology, but they won't know what to do if they find a broken link or can't find their way off of your home page. Their only option is to leave, and you want your entire site indexed not just your landing page. Use text links and avoid JavaScript when creating your navigation and make sure you provide the search spiders with a Site Map.

Tips & Warnings
Content is important add fresh content OFTEN.

Check your links often

Use smaller files & photo sizes

Use CSS

Keep your site clean and easy to navigate

Avoid putting valuable keywords in your meta tags

Avoid adding keywords to your content just to add them

www.journeyforself.com

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