Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

Do you have a Web site and are looking to optimize your site for search engines? Are companies promising you that they’ll “make you #1 in Google” or making some other promise that just screams scam? Here are a few pointers to help you get started on your way with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

• TITLE TAGS - Your title tags are the first thing that the search engines will see when they crawl your web site. They are also the first thing potential customers will see when they see your listing in the search engine results. Make sure you have unique titles on every page and make sure they are descriptive. Also make sure to incorporate your keywords in the title as much as possible.
• DESCRIPTIONS - Your descriptions, also known commonly as META Description Tags, are what the search engine uses as a description of your site. If you omit the meta description tag, the search engine will use the first content it can find from your site as it’s description.
• CONTENT - Your content is KING. Make sure your keywords are in your content. Search engines cannot determine intent of your content, all they can do is read what you have on the page. If you are not using your keywords in the content, then you will not be deemed relevant by the search engines for those keywords. Try re-writing your content to incorporate your keywords. Add your keywords to the headlines on your pages. Search engines cannot see what an image is so make sure all your images have good descriptive ALT tags.
• FILE NAMES - Naming your files something like “page1.html” really means nothing to the search engine. Be as descriptive as possible when naming your files. If you sell used cars, name your listing page something like “buy_used_cars.html”. Do the same with saving images, pdfs, flash or other files you might use on your web site.
• ANALYZE - Make sure you have a good Analytics package on your site. Tracking the results, goals, visitors, etc. can be very crucial to optimizing your site. Google Analytics is free and a great tool. All you need to do is create an account with Google.

These are just a few pointers to help you get started in your SEO efforts. There are many many other things you can do to help make your site relevant to the search engines. Pick up a book or contact your favorite SEO expert to learn more about it.

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