SEO - How To SEO Your Website

Published September 2nd, 2008

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of building a website that is technically suitable for search engines to read and index it. With a website that is technically suitable for indexing, it will rank higher on search engine result pages for target keywords or key phrases that you are optimizing for.

Organic traffic from search engines usually occupies the biggest pie of a website overall traffic. Therefore, it is extremely important for you to know how to optimize your website to achieve high rankings for various search terms. So how to SEO your website and achieve good natural search results? Let me share with you the 3 most important SEO strategies that must be put in place:

1. Proper on-page optimization. Although it is important to create a website that is aesthetically pleasing for human visitors, you should not neglect the underlying coding and content of your site. This is because in order to obtain good natural search rankings, the coding architecture and content of your website are extremely important. You need to ensure that the basics are in place for each page of your website. Every page of your website should be optimized for target key phrases that are relevant to the content of the page itself. Make sure that the relevant HTML Title, H1, H2, Alt, and Meta tags contain your target key phrases. On your page, do place navigation text links for spiders to follow so that it can index other underlying pages.

2. Optimized content. When it comes to SEO, content is king. Keywords should be littered within your content so as to make your pages more relevant to search engines. You should also keep the content of your site fresh so as to facilitate indexing by spiders. One thing to note is that you should not place too many keywords within your content just for the sake of ranking well. Google will view this as keyword spamming. Also, ensure that your content is unique. Never repeat or copy & paste content from other websites.

3. Get more backlinks. Another important factor for your website to rank well is to have good link popularity. To obtain good link popularity, you need to get websites to link back to your pages. You should add it to directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ to get valuable link juices. Additional thing that you can do is to write articles and submit them to article directories.

SEO is a complicated topic and we have just scratched the surface here. However, I still hope that you have benefited from the points that I have shared with you here.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of OOm, an online marketing agency providing SEO Singapore services.