Things You Must Do To Optimize For Google
In any business the most important thing is traffic. In a bricks and mortar shop it is traffic through the door that brings the sales. Each person that walks through the door is a potential customer. It is no different on the internet. Your site is found because a search engine sent them through their search or you have drawn them through other advertising.
Seeing as how a lot of your business will come through the search engines you need to make sure that you are listed in the top 10 or 20; Basically the first two pages. Here are some of the things you must do:
Choose The Right Keywords
First you need to do a keyword search. This will tell you what terms people are using to search your niche. Now you need to choose your keywords. This is very important. In your research you will see how many searches are done for a particular word or phrase. You need to choose those that have a good number of searches but not too much competition.
Look for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are keyword phrases of from 3 - 5 words. In your research you will need to look at how many searches are made on that phrase as you will need to have a reasonable amount of searches. You also need to note how much competition that phrase has. If there are too many trying for that phrase it will be better to choose another; One that you can get to the top 10.
What you need to do to optimize your site.
Of first importance is your page title tag. This tag is very important as it is used by Google in its search results. This tag is used in each of Google’s listings.
In setting up this tag, you need to use the keyword phrase that your research has helped you to choose. It is best to have this phrase come up early in your title tag. If you can use it twice in the tag, do so. You MUST use it at least once in this tag.
It is also important to have a unique title tag for each page.
An XML Sitemap can be helpful. While it does not directly affect your rankings, it will help Google to more quickly index the changes you make to your site.
To eliminate or reduce 404 errors a robots.txt file is useful as well. This is the first file the search engine will look for when it visits your site to index it.
There are many more thing that can and should be done to optimize your site for the search engines. These few pointers will be helpful in getting your site listed in the top 10. We will deal with other things in a future article.
