Search engine optimization is a vital stride every company should take into consideration while designing a website. SEO assists a business to get its website on the top list of search engine results page (SERP) organically. By performing SEO activities a website will receive more visitors from search engine.

How does Search Engines help you drive traffic to your website?

When someone enters a topic for search, the search engine will rush through the millions of pages it has indexed about and bring the websites relevant to your topic on the top lists. The sites crawled by the search engines are also ranked, so that the most pertinent ones come first. It is the Keywords that play an important role than any exclusive online or offline advertising of your website.

Why is it important to perform SEO?

Majority of people are driven to the most visited websites through search engines. Search engines which cover the major market share are: Yahoo!, MSN and Google. To support my research I interviewed 10 of my colleagues to know how they identify websites which suits their interests (information, buying a product or service, comparison etc). According to them, firstly they use search engines to identify sites relevant to their interest. Secondly, they get connected to a site by clicking in a link from another website or page that relates to the topic they are concerned about. Moreover, in rare cases they also check websites if it is advertised well through the traditional medias.

As SEO is a crucial process for driving traffic to your website, I have investigated few SEO activities which your company can perform in-house, thus cutting the cost by not hiring SEO vendor.

51 SEO TIPS

1. To keep away from competition choose key phrases rather choosing keywords. Ex: For keywords like Marketing, you can use Marketing Outsourcing, Marketing Agency, Marketing Consultants, Affordable Marketing Solutions, Effective Marketing Strategies etc. (Ps: Wordtrcaker, Trellian Keyword Discovery, Google Adwords Tool will help you in researching keywords).

2. If you haven’t registered your domain name yet, ensure you incorporate one of your primary keywords in your domain / sub domain name of your website. The keywords can be integrated together or you can also make use of hyphens. For ex: www.marketingoutsourcing.com or www.marketing-ousourcing.com.

3. The secondary and tertiary keywords can be integrated in your directory name and filename. For example: http://www.soravjain.com/2009/08marketing-through-linkedin-twitter-and.html is best for keyword Marketing through LinkedIn or marketing through twitter.

4. As search engines does not appreciate errors much, ensure your webpage is away from all the syntax errors. Check your HTML and CSS before finalizing and validate any errors.

5. Page Titles are the most crucial part of your website as they are displayed in search results. So, keep your mind wise and decide an interesting title with 9 – 10 words (40 – 85 characters) with keywords (primary) of first level integrated.

6. You keywords can’t suffice on your title tag. So make sure, you suffice them in your heading tags as H1 H2 and H3. Remember, title tags and headings tags should be different. Make sure the headings are not too big, CSS can help you reduce the size.

7. Meta tag description is mainly the description which comes below the title. As this is displayed on search engines, ensure you make use of keywords to describe it.

8. Navigation is a crucial part of your website. Make sure you integrate a Blog, Article and Glossary section, which can be easily updated using Content Management Systems. This will also increase the size of your website and moreover, many quality contents can be incorporated.

9. Ensure you have wonderfully designed website with all your pages interconnected. This interconnection will not only assist you in incorporating keywords to the links, but also obtain a better page rank from search engines.

10. Article, Blogs and other interactive section will help you obtain more people to your website. Information which can assist people, will aid your website get authority. For example; if you write an article on 101 social media marketing tips, tips are most appreciated by readers. If tips are interesting, chances of your website getting an 'expert authority' is most.

11. Make use of text navigation menu instead of using images or java scripts. In the text menu or on link, keywords can be incorporated as the inner links get crawled by Google. Add text immediately next to the hyperlink you have created with keywords.

12. Ensure you also make use of synonyms of the keywords also Use ‘alt’ attribute to explain your image with proper keywords

13. Confirm you create a sitemap for your website and submit it to the Google so that the search engine crawlers crawl all your pages as they get indexed when a sitemap is submitted.

14. Ensure your page size doesn’t exceed 20 – 30 KB for easy downloading.

15. Do not use flash, as search engines don’t appreciate flash. Keep contents away from images, java scripts etc.

16. Make use of a static URL. Static URLs are the simple form of URLs with keywords for example; www.soravjain.com/about-sorav.html. A dynamic URL is www.sorav/123&=**,.// . If you are using a dynamic URL ensure you change it to the static one using digital point or other tools available on the web.

17. Do not keep any hidden links, hidden contents or hidden pages in a website. Search engines do not appreciate that.

18. Add more quality content to your website and do not puff in many keywords as the search engines will penalize you for doing so.

19. Submit your website only once to Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and all other search engines. Perform this process manually; don’t use any script or website for automatic submission.

20. If your content is dynamic and you often update your website with variety of contents. Provide RSS feeds and Newsletter option for readers.

The above mentioned were the things need to be taken into consideration while designing the website. It is important to get votes from other websites by obtaining a link from them. To obtain enormous number of backlinks you need to consider following strategies;

21. First of all, check your website’s current status from Website Grader which will help you obtain an accurate report of your present website status at no cost. Yahoo site explorer (list of websites refereeing to you) and Digital Point (various SEO tools) can also help you understand your website’s present status from SEO perspective.

22. Check, who are providing you backlinks and for what reasons? So, that you can update you website accordingly.

23. It is important to update website on regular basis, as search engines loves to crawl recently updated ones.

24. Services or products you offer might not attract much to your customers. If you have something interesting such as: interesting contents or contests that would be added benefit for you to obtain back links. So, build pages with interesting things.

25. You can have ‘must have’ resources such as; Guides, blogs, articles, news etc related to your services. This will help you obtain authorization.

26. The articles which get most authorized on web are; 101 list of websites for social media marketing

27. 101-Tips for social media marketing (ex: 101 SEO tips, 51 marketing tips, 51 interesting blog widgets, 101 medical billing tips etc). This can be in relevance to the service you offer.

28. 10 easy ways to help ___________ (ex: promoting your business)

29. _______Myths (ex: Marketing Myths), swine flu myths etc.

30. Extensive resource list for specific topic. For obtaining this you need to surf the web and make a complete list of resources relevant to your services. Best way is to collect analyst’s speeches, articles and white papers.

31. You can also have a Discussion page on gurus and experts (flatters experts on later point of time and generates thought leadership or recognition)

32. You can also create short survey relevant to your services or products and present the reports for people to read.

33. Any innovative concept that can drive people to authorize the website or consider it as Hub.

34. Creating these things and updating the website will just not suffice. It is crucial to popularize it via various Social Medias. You can paste the links of your articles on your LinkedIn profile, Facebook Profile and can do target marketing through twitter.

35. If you have enough time you can also create a link-building campaign. Were you exchange links with other people. But make sure, when you do so you might get fooled by people for providing you links from non-reputed websites.

36. Affiliated marketing is the best way to obtain links as well as traffic from popular websites. But, in return you either promise an amount or a link back to their website.

37. There are various directories from where you can buy the links or paste it for free at few places. These directories are of great help to obtain SEO rankings in the past. But, now Search Engines do not give it much preference. Though it is still traced as said by practitioners.

38. You can create your own external link. Start maintaining blogs and provide back links to your website by writing interesting articles.

39. The Blogs will not only provide back links to your website. Interesting articles will drive good traffic to blog which will be directed to your website.

40. Do not forget to update links of your articles and blogs on various bookmarking sites. As only when people come to your site you have chances to get authorized and obtain back links.

41. Article reproduction is also a necessary task for you to obtain quality back links. There are so many article zones were you can submit extremely qualified articles with back links to your website.

42. You can obtain the list of article zones. You need to register in these hubs with similar name and ID to avoid contradictions of article owner. The article zones will not only offer you a back links but will also help you getting a relevant good traffic.

43. Create new websites with relevant information similar to your website. Invest time, money and work hours to popularize them. These websites you can use as vehicle to drive traffic to your primary website and also for advertising it. A word press blog would be great option.

44. Don’t close the eyes to Google’s, Yahoo’s, MSN’s and BING’s image search functions. Most of the times, you can get a advanced traffic from the image search engines then from the normal search, particularly if you have a content rich website.

45. Just an aide memoire for you: use the title characteristic on links that surround the images, and use the ALT attribute on the image tags themselves. Also, bear in mind to rename your images with pertinent descriptive words (a maximum of 4 words works best).

46. Do not work speedily to build the links. Or else you’ll be into the sandbox. Gain note more than 5-10 links a month.

47. Build funny pages that will make your visitors laugh a bit and maybe will attract some links as it can easily avail you a authority and back link.

48. Do not bulk up the website with lot of keywords all together or else no sooner your website will be the part of sandbox. Sandbox is where the most penalized websites are put. Its almost like JAIL, quite tough to come out.

49. Do not forget to share this page with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg and other bookmarking sites.

50. Also avoid these mistakes

51. Obtain and integrate code from Google Analytics for your website. Google Analytics will help you obtain statistics of keywords that are driving people to your blog. It will also obtain data for referral sites and direct traffic to your website. This service is absolutely free.

Also Read:

1. Risk Management: Tips to Manage your Company's Reputation on Social Medias
2. Social Media Revolution - Interesting Video
3. Looking into LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook from Marketing Perspective
4. Facebook Branding Tips Share