Step 1 – Prior to starting your SEO campaign check these out…

Most webmasters or business will start thinking about search engine optimization after they have completed their website.  This is completely wrong, a good SEO campaign must start even before the website has been designed.

If your business is selling cars you should try to decide if it is more feasible to target the keyword “cars for sale” or the longer keyword “vehicles for sale” on the search engine.  Google itself provides several tools that can help you decide what keywords you should be targeting and how you can achieve sales.

‘Google Trends’ is one such tool, it helps you identify the popularity of certain keywords, so it will let you compare if people are typing “cars for sale” or “vehicles for sale”.  This optimization tool will even let you compare such search trends in various regions of the world, so people in the USA might be typing “vehicles” but users in Europe might be looking for cars mostly.

‘Google Analytics’ is also a great source of information that a serious webmaster should install soon after launching the website, this tool will give you access to an unprecedented amount of statistics about the visitors of your site.  The Google Analytics program can track visitors from various referrers, including of course search engine.  The webmaster can compare the landing page and the final sales conversion therefore any tweaking to the website will be based on an informed-decision and not on an experimental and amateurish basis.

Step 2 – Optimizing your website to be search engine friendly.

Websites may be highly optimized for a search engine and rank very high in the results pages whilst be of a low value to humans looking at the page.  Therefore having a highly optimized website and getting more traffic does not necessarily translate into more sales.  The focus should be on finding an optimum balance between these two extremes of the spectrum, on one side we have a highly optimized website full of text which is dull to a human and on the other extreme we have a website full of flash and photos which is completely useless to a search engine crawling the website

Knowing what people are looking for on your website and giving it to them whilst making the search engines happy will do the trick, nevertheless it’s no easy task.  Here are some tips to keep in mind when designing your website:

1. Websites that use frames will not be indexed correctly by search engine, therefore it is better if you avoid them in your design.  Frames use an outdated HTML method to show two HTML files on one screen and it is very difficult for the search engines to make up which is the ‘content’ screen and which is the menu screen, therefore frames should be avoided and a CSS (cascading style sheets) should be used instead
2. Websites using PHP or mySQL may face a similar problem depending on what platform is being used.  For example Wordpress blogs managed to minimize this problem because plugins are now available to optimize posts and content to achieve an optimum position on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Msn.
3. Some content management system will leave your website urls looking something like: www.yoursite.com/archives/2342434&hf.html which will not be indexed properly by the search engines, you can work around this by renaming your html files to proper names eg. www.yoursite/archives/vehiclesforsale.html.
4. Search engines love footer links, sitemaps, blogs, and XML feeds, use them

Step 3 - Link Building

So you have optimized your website, the content is right, the keywords have been selected but still the search engines are not ranking your website high on the results page for your keywords.  Why is this?

Google was the pioneer of today’s method of showing results based on inbound links, which google calls pagerank.  So let us take a simple example where two competing website are competing for the same keyword “cars for sale” and both are optimized equally and are search engine friendly, how will the search engine decide which one to put higher on the search engine results page?  Google devised a method to count incoming links to a website and create a pagerank for that particular website, the higher the pagerank the higher the website will show up on the search engine results pages.  This method of counting inbound links to a website was later emulated on all other major search engines.

There are two ways of building good backlinks to your website, let me share them with you:

1.      Participating in an active community based around your website subject is an extremely powerful link building technique, therefore if you create a blog and post comments on other blogs similar to yours with a backlink will definitely help raise your website pagerank.  Posting constructive comments and participating in the virtual community will earn you links back to your blog and your website.  Do not just post general comments around as this will earn you the title of ‘spammer’ and you may get banned.

2.      Many internet search engine optimization gurus nowadays are suggesting that internet marketers write articles around the same topic/industry of the website and submit these articles in various article directories available in the internet, the trick is to add your website URL in the resource box below the article.  This will have a twofold advantage that search engines will add this backlink to your website as a point in favor of your pagerank and will also get you some direct traffic from visitors reading the article.

You may also get links from SEO friendly directories such as DMOZ, yahoo directory and BOTW however steer away from link farms and link buying schemes as if you get caught using these services the search engines will ban you.

Good luck in your SEO.