Focus on converting your website visits into clients. Website traffic is only half the battle, not even the important half. Building great content with a well designed site is!

Search Engine Optimization or "SEO" can be instrumental in getting your organization noticed on the Internet. There are literally millions and millions of websites to compete with. How does one website set them apart from the rest? One answer is SEO.

SEO is NOT about tricking Search Engines such as Google or Bing into giving your website a high rank. They have measures in place to catch this and will punish you by demoting your website ranking on their search engine results. SEO is about building a website that incorporates a number of programming techniques and good, relevant content to help search engine robots and crawlers index your site.

Follow these main SEO Tips to help improve your website rankings:

1. Title Tag
   Having a relevant title tag to the content on the page is probably the most important thing to remember with optimization. The title of your page should contain the core keywords of the topic of the web page. If the title of the page does not match the content, you will be ranked lower.
   
   
2. Good Content
   Content is King! Quality content on your web page will drive traffic to your site. Try to make your content unique, interesting and relevant to the search phrase you are focusing on. External links to relevant sites will also help. Make your page the most relevant source of information about your topic in the internet!
   
   
3. External Links
   Links are what search engines use to crawl the internet. A link from one site to another helps search engines find content for them to index. When your site has links to other relevant sites, you are rewarded with a higher ranking because Google or Bing can use your website to find more content on other web pages besides your own. Without an external link to go to, the crawl stops
   
   Remember to use the standard HREF tag whenever possible when creating your links. JavaScript links are harder for search engine crawlers and robots to locate. To learn more about how to build links to your site, click here.
   
   
4. Meta Tag Description
   Always use a Meta Description Tag. The Meta Description tag gives a description of your web page. It is a short, plain language description of the page, usually consisting of 20-25 words or less. Search engines that support the Meta Description tag will use the information to publish on their search results page, normally displaying below the Title of your site listing.
   
   
5. Web Page Filename
   To improve your rankings, use your keywords in the name of file for the page. For example, if your web page is designed around the keyword phrase of "Calgary Widgets". Name of the filename for the webpage CalgaryWidgets.aspx. Google and other search engines will use the filename of the webpage in it's rankings.
   
   
6. Site Maps
   A sitemap will assist search engines in finding and accessing pages on your site. It puts all the links to to your site in one, easy to find spot. Crawlers love this. A sitemap.xml page is also important. It allows you to rank the most important pages on your website. As a result, search engines will index those pages first and revisit them more often.
   
   
7. Avoid Using Flash or Use Flash Correctly
   Most search engine crawlers are unable to index Flash since it is a single file containing everything from text, links, music and images. They can't decompress all that information and as a result, crawlers ignore the content all together. In addition, some mobile phones such as the iPhone are unable to present Flash content on their browsers. Problems arise when a site viewed by those users appears incomplete and is missing content.
   
   If you are planning on using Flash for your site, ensure that your site contains the same content in the Flash file is presented with regular HTML. Building redirect pages with standard HTML will allow search engine crawlers index the same content they could not index in Flash.
   
   
8. Robots File
   A robots file is a special file sitting in the root directory of your website. When a search engine crawler visits your site, the fist thing it looks for is a robots.txt file or a robots tag. This file or tag instructs the crawler where it is allowed to visit. The robots file also tell the crawler where it should avoid visiting since you may have parts of your site that is restricted or has irrelevant information that you do not want indexed. By using a robots.txt file you maximize the time of a crawler by directing it to the places on your site that are most important.
   
   

Overall, Content is King when designing your website. It's the most important tip. With great content and applying the programming tips listed above, you can help search engine crawlers index your site. In turn your rankings on the various search engines out there will improve.

Remember, an analyst at Turton Consulting can help you with implementing all these search engine optimization tips. Contact us for a free SEO estimate.

Happy Optimizing!