Webmaster Resources

Webmaster Articles

DIY Search Engine Optimization

The url or domain name of your online home business is an important place for your main keyword, but more often than not those just starting an online home business are not aware of this until after they have registered their domain name and started marketing their home business, but you can always register a sub-domain name with your chosen keyword included.  There are many other ways to optimize a web site for the search engines.

The meta tags are part of the behind-the-scenes source code on your webpage that give information to the search engine robots enabling them to index your online home business website properly.

The title meta tag is what will show up in the search engine results as the title of your website and so it is one of the best ways to appeal to both search engines and potential website visitors.  Add your main keywords into your title tag being careful not to stuff it with keywords so that it becomes meaningless to your potential customers.  Certainly avoid just listing your keywords in the title tag.  You need to aim to include a short, precise, descriptive piece of text that accurately describes what your online home business has to offer.

The description meta tag will usually show up under the title of your webpage in the search engine results, which means it is actually an advert for your website.  Ideally this should contain text that tells the visitor what your online home business can offer them as well as contain some keywords.  Limit your description to 250 characters including spaces.

Visitors to your site will find it helpful if they find headings and subheadings giving them an idea of what your site is about and by adding keywords to these headings and adding a piece of html code around the headings will optimize your site for the search engine robots.  The search engine spiders will see from these headings that the content of your website reflects the keywords in your title tag.

The spiders crawl through your site looking for text to tell them how to categorize your site and it pays to make life easy for the spiders.   They check how relevant the content of your site is to certain search terms, so you need to spread your keywords strategically throughout the text of your website.  Place top performing keywords at least once or twice in the first and last paragraphs and mention them once in the body of your content. Use variations of your keywords instead of repeating the same keyword over and over again.  Use strong tags to target phrases also. Do not over use bold / strong tags, use once or twice on each page.

Ideally, it is best to optimize your web page for two or three keywords at most.  If you want to optimize your website for more keywords or if your website if offering a variety of products or services then rather create a separate web page for each product or service and optimize each page for related keywords.  This way will ensure that a potential customer who clicked on a certain advert or link is taken straight to the page relative to their search, rather than to a home page where they have to look for the actual product they searched for.  By streamlining the sales process makes it easier for potential customers to make a purchase.

Bear in mind that the search engine robots can only view text, when they come across images they will find no information to gather, as the html code for an image only identifies the location of the image.  You can take advantage of the opportunity to add keywords by using an alt tag and title tag for the image.  The alt text on images should describe the image and if possible these images will be related to your targeted phrase. The title lets you use alternate keywords without breaking the flow for visitors.

In the source code of your online home business website you will probably find images that make up the design of your site and these also offer the opportunity to use alt tags to add keywords.  They may already be in your source code so you need to look for this code after the image location html alt=”” and you can insert your keywords inside the inverted commas, be sure to keep them brief and do not stuff with keywords.

Since search engine robots do not read punctuation marks such as full stop, commas etc., you can use a keyword phrase that runs from the end of one sentence into the beginning of another.  In other words you do not have to contain your keyword phrase within a sentence.

Whether you are just starting an online home business or have had your website for a while, always follow the golden rule of organic search engine optimization i.e. Create your online home business web pages for your users, not search engines. In other words write a descriptive and convincing html title that will appeal to your visitors and then make sure that your keywords appear in the title in order to make it search engine friendly.