Professional Search Engine Optimization

Recent findings suggest that there are around 5 billion websites out there on the Internet. 5 billion! That's more than 10 times the population of the United States! So when a user types in a query on a search engine page, what are the chances of your website making it to the top 3 result pages? Well, if your website happens to be just another run-of-the-mill website, then your chances are quite miniscule. However, if it happens to be a good search engine optimized website, then you have bright chances of being featured on the first few result pages of the search engine.

With every passing day, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more important for companies that rely on the Internet for their business and revenue. SEO being a concept that is generally unknown to the common man, the task of empowering a website and making it compatible with SEO standards is left to professional SEO consulting services, who do the needful.

Role of a Professional SEO Consulting Service
The ultimate goal of an SEO consulting service is simple - edit and optimize the website content to make it easily retrievable for different search engines. This ensures that the website gets a high ranking on the search result pages. For this purpose, the SEO consultants must thoroughly study the workings of different search engine algorithms and analyze their indexes, caches and log files. Search engines tweak their algorithms from time to time, so it is important for the SEO consultants to constantly update their knowledge and remain abreast of changing trends.

Optimizing a Website Using SEO Methods
SEO consultants work on different aspects and parts of a website during the process of optimizing it, to match the global SEO standards. Here are a few tasks that are typically performed in this process:

• Keyword Analysis and Research: This is one of the first things that SEO consultants do. After scrutinizing the entire website in detail, they perform extensive keyword research and analysis, after which they identify a set of keywords which are best suited for that website. On the basis of their analysis, they prioritize keywords as primary and secondary.
• Increasing Keyword Density: After a particular set of keywords has been identified, they then make sure that these keywords appear relatively regularly throughout the entire website content.
• Link Building: Link building involves creating internal links i.e. internally linking the different pages of the website, as well as getting backlinks from other reputed websites.
• Checking the Tags: An SEO consultant checks whether the website content contains title tags and meta tags in their correct form. This is an important factor which can severely affect the page rank.
• Optimizing the Webpage Content: This is another issue that SEO consultants must address during the process of optimizing the entire website. They typically check the webpages for duplicate content, plagiarized content, hidden content, offensive or abusive language and take appropriate measures to rectify these issues.
• Validating the Code: SEO consultants also go through the individual webpage designs and the HTML code to check for any syntax errors or bugs that could potentially harm the website ranking.

Search Engine Optimization Strategies For Increase Your Rankings

The process of improving the quantity and quality of traffic to a website from search engines is referred to as search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization techniques aim at improving the search engine ranking of a website so that the site appears in the top few search results on a search engine. Search engine optimizers target different kinds of searches that web users tend to perform. This includes image and video searches, text-based searches as well industry-specific searches. Search engine optimization is a niche area that includes keyword research, website traffic analysis and web content optimization involving the editing of web content, its HTML coding and building of links. Following is an outline of some of the search engine optimization techniques. Take a look.

Keyword Optimization: The search terms, which are used by web users to conduct online searches are known as keywords or key phrases. Keywords are used to describe the purpose and content of a website and enable the website to rank higher in the web search results. A good search engine ranking depends not only on the choice of keywords but also on their placement in web content as also their density. Keywords should best describe the topic and content in the web page and should generate relatively less number of search results after performing a search on Google. This means that they have less competition on the web and thus have higher chances of ranking higher in search engines. It is important to place the keywords in the title and the description in the web page. They should also be used throughout the page, especially in the introductory paragraphs and the closing lines of the content.

Link Building: A link is a navigation element that directs a user from one web document to another. Web pages should contain links from popular websites. The quality of incoming links is an important factor contributing to the page rank of a web page. Embedding relevant links within the web page content helps in fetching a higher search engine rank for a web page. The use of dead links, those which direct a user to an inaccessible page, should be strictly avoided. Google considers the outbound links from a website, as determinants of the quality of the website content. Internal links (links between the pages of the same website) make the search engines realize that the website is huge, thus making it a strong contender for a high search engine rank.

Website Design: Website design plays a major role in search engine ranking. It should be easy for the search engines to navigate web pages. According to experts, search engines prefer text to other graphic or multimedia formats. Websites using Flash or Javascript should make an HTML version of their website available for users. The contents of a left navigation bar are read before the main content by search engines. It is important for website developers to avoid placing excessive content on one page; instead, they should evenly distribute the content among well-structured and internally linked web pages. It is advisable to use topic pages containing articles that focus on that subject. It is believed that websites having more than 100 pages on the same topic have high chances of ranking better than their competitors. Also, it is important for a website URL to correspond with the page content. According to experts, it is essential for every website to have a site map. A site map is a page that has links to all the other pages of a website, thus helping these pages rank in prominent search engines.

Use of HTML Tags: Besides gathering user attention and improving web usability, HTML tags also play a vital role in search engine optimization. Title tags are used for displaying web page titles, which are the most significantly visible elements of web pages. Heading tags can be used for content intended for prominent display on a web page. Meta tags help the search engines in listing a website in their indices. They are inserted at the top of a web page following the title element. The meta description tags are used to influence the search engine crawlers, which support the tag. The meta keywords tags are used to reinforce certain important terms in the web page content.

Black Hat SEO: Attempts to improve search engine ranking in ways that are not approved by search engines are known as black hat SEO techniques. Using hidden text or hidden links in order to manipulate relevancy of web content is one of the commonly used unethical SEO strategies. An excessive use of links, or the embedding of unrelated links in web pages is another black hat SEO technique.