FM Walsh & Associates Inc.

SEO is a topic that I often get asked about so today’s posting comes courtesy of Lisa A. Riley, web & graphic designer, who lays out 6 tips for effective SEO.

1. Keywords: Fine tune the keywords you will be utilizing throughout your website. Places like Wordtracker.com will help to fine tune what keywords are the most searched and the amount of competition. Click on this link - it’s a good one for providing keyword ideas.
Make sure the keyword generator you use pulls data from the major search engines: Google, Yahoo & Windows Live.

2. Titles/Meta Description: Use keywords in the content of your pages and most important the Title of the web pages on your site. The search engines pull & display the Titles in the search results. Also make sure keywords are in the Meta Description of each page. When the search engines display the search results they also display the first few lines of your Meta Description.

3. Links On Your Site: When the search engines crawl the web, they not only evaluate your site, they also evaluate the links you may have on your site, determining how useful the site and links will be to viewers. Have links to other sites that might be heavily visited. It’s almost like the crawlers not only check to see how popular you are, but who you hang out with.

4. Popularity Contest: Search engines evaluate whether your site will be listed on the first few search results pages, based on how much traffic has been at your site. The more hits, the better chance of having your site bumped up to a higher ranking.

5. Fresh Content: Search engines love “fresh” content. They re-crawl the web every 30 days. That is why it is important to revise content on your site regularly. Upload articles or have a blog sitting on your website.

6. Get Your URL Out There: Having a link to your site in as many places as you can help to draw more traffic to your site. See if you can get your website link on other companies’ sites, articles, directories, listings, online communities (linkedin, facebook, etc), e-newsletters, press releases, and entries on other people’s blogs.