|
First of all, I want to insist that this article
is aimed at site
owners since sometimes site owners and webmasters are different.
Suppose a realtor has a real estate website. But,
she is just a newbie on the Internet
and she leans on the webmaster
(from hosting provider, for example) in her website's SEO campaign. In
fact, that webmaster couldn't understand real estate industry deeply
like her and he has many other sites to manage. So the SEO
campaign wouldn't get the expected result. In most cases, the site
owners will play an important role in the success of SEO campaign.
However, HTML language, search
engines,
link popularity, PageRank seem so strange to them at first. Thus, the
purpose of this article is providing the amateur site owners with some
basic but effective tools and knowledge in Search
Engine
Optimization.
This will help site owners collaborate better with webmasters or SEO
firms to boost their websites' position in Search Engines.
1. Search
Engines
-You are a site owner and you yourself should be familiar with search
engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN
Search
to search for your competitors' sites to see how they are promoting
themselves in the marketplace, evaluate the keywords, check your sites'
link popularity (the number of links to your website from other sites)
and link saturation (number of pages on your sites have been indexed by
search engine). These search engine syntaxes aren't academic as you've
imagined and you don't need to care about the complicated algorithms
behind them. For example, to check whether your sites are indexed, just
type site:your_site_domain in search engines. Remember that
your_site_url and your_site_domain are not the same. Site domain does
not include http:// while site URL must have (ex: http://your_site_domain/your_page.htm
is a URL of your site).
Suppose
the SEO firm, in their optimization report, would ask the site owners
to exchange links with other relevant sites to improve the link
popularity. The problem is: where can I find the other sites? Don't
worry, search engines can assist you. Site owners can learn from their
competitors about which sites they've exchanged links with by checking
their link popularity.
In short, if you want search engines to
help carry in business, you should make friends with them first. Search
engines are always useful friends (although not easy to control!).
2.
HTML basic syntax and HTML editor - Site owners don't have to master
HTML language to re-design their pages. That is not their job. But
basic syntaxes are always necessary.
For example, they should know
to locate where the <head> block in an html page is to
insert new
auto-generated Meta-tags. I've mentioned auto-generated Meta-tags
because site owners don't need to code the Meta-tags either. With
"Meta-tags Generator" keyword, they can find that on search engines
thousands of websites are welcoming them to use their tool. Besides,
the html link syntax is also worthy to remember: Look at this simple
code <a href="your_site_url_1">your descriptive
text</a>
which you send to other site owners for link exchange. Your website has
many pages for exchanging links so it's significant to understand this
link code to change your_site_url_1 to other pages and your descriptive
text respectively. In addition, with the knowledge of html syntax, you
can open your web pages and add the links on your own and stop calling
your webmasters all the time for modifying pages with links. Today,
html editors such as FrontPage, DreamWeaver can highly simplify this
task in the similar way as you are working in MS Word. Just select the
position in Design view (in FrontPage) and paste the link code in the
Code view at the cursor.
3. Google toolbar - Google Toolbar is
a useful tool for web surfers and even more useful to site owners to
check PageRank. PageRank is a Google's grade (from 0 to 10) to measure
the page's popularity on the net. With high pageranks, they don't
guarantee a high position in Google's search results but they can tell
us many things. PageRank encourages site owners in the long process of
SEO. The little green color on this bar looks like fruits in the tree
of our efforts and we are motivated to dig more in SEO. In addition,
PageRank helps site owners to find appropriate sites to exchange links
with. Search for the sites with the same level (pagerank) to foresee
the success of your link exchange requests. To install Google toolbar
to your browsers (Internet Explorer or Firefox), just start by typing
Google toolbar in search engines and follow the first result.
In
this article, I've provided the site owners with some basic but
effective tools to come along their SEO campaigns. They include but not
limit to search engines, HTML editor, and Google toolbar. Besides,
there are others such as FTP tool, Google sitemap, Link Directory
software... The important thing to amateur site owners is forgetting
your main career and get your hands wet with these tools. Webmaster and
SEO firm cannot do everything for you. Learning SEO tools today will
never be too late and wasted.
Article by Mike Pham of
http://www.TopTrafficWholesaler.com , a full service search
engine submission and targeted
website traffic company. We offer a unmatched system to increase website
visitors at the most competitive rates.
|
