Lets discuss about the on-page and off-page factors that search engines use to decide your website's ranking. In other words how to optimize your site using SEO techniques (Search Engine Optimization). But before that, lets take a look at what SEO is:
SEO refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in the organic/natural search results. This helps more people who are looking for your product or service find you. There are two types of SEO techniques- White Hat & Black Hat. Don't ever think of using Black Hat techniques!!! Search engines consider these as cheating and your website will be banned by the search engine, and chances are you won't be able to get back ever! BMW was blacklisted by Google in 2006 because the car manufacturer resorted to bad SEO practices (http://edition.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/02/07/google/). Sorry for the digression, lets talk about the page factors.
On-Page SEO
Choose relevant keywords that fit your tarket market i.e. what is the terminology that your customers use to describe your product. Place these keywords in the page title, URL, headings, and page text. Place keywords in other “invisible” places on your site, including meta-keyword tags and alt-text on images. This is a neglected area, even by the companies who have hired external consultants to optimize their site. Google's spider CANNOT read images. You need to put an image name (by using alt-text) so that the spider figures out what the image is about.
Off-Page SEO
This is little complex and is about building more inbound links from other sites into yours. Each link serves as a recommendation or a reference to tell the search engine that your site is a quality site. Try to build more links from trusted websites. As references from well-respected friends and experts offer more value, so do links from trusted and well-respected websites. The way to do this is to submit your website to directories like Yahoo!, business.com etc. Use social media- Facebook, Twitter etc to commuicate with your target audience. Write blogs and have people comment on your product. Also, participate in other relevant blogs to your product- add a point, add a useful link, disagree, ask a question so that you get noticed among your target audience.
The most important thing while starting a blog is to use your own domain like I have mine as www.karantaneja1984.blogspot.com The blog should also allow for email and should have integration with social media sites so that users can spread the word.
All these Off-Page SEO techniques are examples of inbound marketing and White Hat SEO practices.
See you later!
