SEO and Your Website

Why Optimize for Search Engines?

Search engine traffic is one of the most sought after traffic sources, this is because: it's free, it's targeted traffic and it can potentially be substantial amounts. In this article I will discuss 5 steps to optimize your website's SEO. I can't promise you top 10 rankings but I can promise you better rankings.

5 Steps to Optimize Your Website's SEO

• Include your keywords in your domain name. If a search engine finds keywords in your domain name it will assume that your website is about this topic, it will obviously verify the keywords by analyzing the other SEO factors but having a good domain name does have benefits. If you have already purchased your domain name and it doesn't include your keywords, don't worry too much - you can still rank highly without it.
  
  As an example, the keyword "CMS" is included in this website's domain name "www.live-CMS.com" so if "CMS" is the target keyword it'll get added SEO benefit. Along with the keywords in the domain name, you should also use your keywords within your directory and file naming conventions, as you can see in the URL of this page, it has some important keywords - www.live-cms.com/articles/SEO_and_Your_Website/.
• Build backlinks from relevant websites. Building backlinks from relevant websites is a very important step to high search engine rankings. An inward link from a relevant website is treated as a "positive vote" by Google. Some methods for building backlinks include; linking to your website from a forum signature, commenting on relevant blog posts with your link, submitting to social networking websites and writing articles. Here is an image depicting how inbound links benefit a website's PageRank and search rankings rankings -
  
  
  
• Avoid dynamic URLs, use .htaccess to rewrite them. Search engines may not index all of your pages if you are using dynamic URLs such as www.domain.com/index.php?page=news, this is because the spider sees just one page - index.php. To avoid this problem you can use .htaccess to re-write your URLs to a more search engine friendly (and user friendly) URLs. Htaccess is a completely different area to SEO so if you want to learn about rewriting URLs with .htaccess, you can read about it in this .htaccess tutorial. As an example, in the scenario above we want to convert the URL from www.domain.com/index.php?page=news to www.domain.com/news/, this is simple with .htaccess, just two lines of code -
  
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^(.+)/ index.php?page=$1
• Use keyword rich page titles and headings. The page title (<title>) and headings (<h1> <h2> etc) should all include the target keywords of the current page. For www.live-cms.com, the <title> is "CMS Articles, CMS Reviews and CMS Demos | www.Live-CMS.com" which is far more appropriate than "CMS Website" or "www.live-cms.com" as it includes the target keywords. We include the target keywords because it is unlikely that smebody will search for "www.live-cms.com" but they might search for "CMS Reviews".
• Write high quality content. Having high quality content is a very important step to high search engine rankings. While a search engine doesn't literally check for high quality content, having high quality content will still improve your SEO significantly because high quality content will naturally generate backlinks from relevant websites.
  
  Having high quality content not only improves your backlinks and SEO, but it also encourages your visitors to return to or stay at your site, this is called visitor retention. With returning visitors your page impressions will increase and if you have monetized your site, your revenue will increase.