A website is very important for just about any kind of business these days. As more number of business realize this there are more number of websites being developed. In fact there are more number of ecommerce websites being developed as we go into the year 2015. However a website is quite similar to a new store in the sense that just like new store need to let the people know that it is out there. In the same way unless the people know about your website it is going to be hard to get any useful traffic on your website.

Getting your website out there so that more number of people are aware that it exists has a technical term, and it is “Digital Marketing”. In fact digital marketing is quite similar to conventional marketing since many of the same factors matter. However of all the techniques that can be used to market a website (digital marketing) search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the more important ones. The reason being that the most common method used by the average Internet user to find information, product or just about anything is by making a search on a Search Engine.

Again as we enter the year 2015, Google is still the kind of search engines and is likely to be for a while considering the highly responsible way in which it handles itself. Thus it is beyond doubt that climbing to the top of Google Ranking is important since you do want to be amongst the top few on the search result list generated as a result of search made by an Internet user.

Hence the question is how do we do it and where do we start. That is what this article is about. It is about all the necessary tasks that lead to a truly (SEO) optimized websites for the search engines. You will get enough to get you started and more…

Research

Keyword research is an important stage and is necessary to do right at the very beginning. Since you already have a website you are already aware of the products or services that you are offering, hence the obvious question is “Why is more research required?”

If we were to compare a website to a local multipurpose store around the corner near a school and residential area, it is likely that customers will start visiting the store almost immediacy, students for their things of interest and the residents for theirs. Hence there is likely to plenty of local customers and occasionally even others from outside of the neighborhood if they are passing by.

The same does not apply to your website. A website is global the instant it hits the World Wide Web and although it is your choice whether you decide to go global or remain local it is necessary to understand who are your customers and where they are coming from, what are they searching for and how. Once you have this information you have achieved the first step towards developing your SEO strategy.

This also are also technical terms for this. The terms I am referring to are targeted audience, popular keywords and unique selling points.

Keyword research is necessary to obtain the relevant but popular keywords being used by the visitors. There are several tools available to perform this research and do more as listed below:

• Google’s Keyword planner: http://www.google.com/sktool, This is a highly robust tool that will require to first login to Google Adwords

• Newcomer Keyword: http://www.keywordtool.io,This is useful to assess the competition and to generate groups of keyword ideas.

• Moz’s Keyword Difficulty: http://www.moz.com/tools/keyword-difficulty

This is very useful tool that can help you estimate the amount of time you will need invest depending on the report of each keyword.

Having done the necessary research it is time to get down to business. But first a quick check of your website is essential. This is essential because the website design plays a big role in SEO as well and if design is not optimized for SEO all your efforts will be in vain.

An optimized website is the one that loads fast, has a good handy navigation where the sub links are kept to the minimum, has good quality relevant content that is readable, delivers what it promises and also be viewable on mobile device.

Helping Google help you

I guess you will agree in order to get to the top of a mountain one must have the correct gear and be aware of the terrain. Getting to the top of the Google Ranking is much the same. To start with you need to know what makes Google give a website a high ranking. You must know that Google indexes every website and that is how they get listed in the search engine in the first place. Thus doing a quick check prior to Google’s indexing process will save you in the remote case where there are some issues. What is also advisable is to monitor our own website, via the several tools available. On such tool is Google’s Webmaster Tool.

This free tool from Google has the ability to monitor the indexation, crawl and content errors. Besides which this tool has the ability to find if you have a 404 Page Not Found error or even the 500 Internal Server Error. If you have all this data upfront and devote resources into solving them you are likely to see your traffic grow uniformly rather than getting hurt from some minor oversights.

It is important to note that SEO is a constant process. Which means if the performance of your website deteriorates so will your ranking. Thus it is necessary to maintain your website. There are several tools available to check the performance of your website as mentioned here:

• http://tools.pingdom.com/
• http://gtmetrix.com/

These tools also provide a list recommendations if any issues are found.

SEO friendly URL structure is still a good thing. SEO friendly URLs have been around since a while now and are still useful. Designing the URLs such that they do not consist of special characters and instead are descriptive names is a good idea. Canonical URLs is also big when it comes to SEO.

The main is to avoid duplicate content on a website. The removal of duplicated content should not be taken lightly in fact. For example it often happens that a website is hosted on a development sever while being development for testing and debugging prior to hosting it on the main domain.

Care should be taken that once the website is hosted on the main domain the version of the website which was on the test server should be removed. If you fail to do this, it can adversely affect the ranking of the website and any SEO efforts made to promote the website would be in vain.

Hence in general it is a good idea to use the meta header described below to fulfil canonical URLs requirement.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://yourwebsite.com” />

The art of SEO

When it comes to finally developing your SEO strategy you will have several techniques available that you can use. The SEO techniques used will depend a lot the mood of Google. I am not mocking Google by saying that. There are several well-known SEO techniques like guest blogging, articles with good content, etc. But things have gone wrong in the past with many SEO teams following Black Hat SEO techniques. The benefit of using such black hat SEO techniques is that your website will shoot to the top in a short time. However that wasn’t acceptable for Google and they are correct to some extent.

Google is the ‘King of Search Engines’ as it stands at the moment. That position comes with a big responsibility. Thus Google has shown great commitment to providing good quality and relevant search results for the keywords used by the average internet user. This means making sure all the underhanded techniques used by several SEO teams be penalized and that is what it does.

Thus Google changes its search engine algorithm to optimize the search results received every now and then. Here is a link to the changes made so far.

http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

However Google is also making minor changes continually and based on the feedback it receives to ensure that only the good SEO techniques are successful. Thus there is a special website page dedicated to measure the changes made on a daily basis with a unique interface to display it.

http://mozcast.com/

In general good and high quality content is increasing in importance as is content marketing. However the other SEO techniques like link building and guest blogging also continue to be popular and effective. At the end of the day as long as you engage in SEO techniques are acceptable and above board you should be fine. Though special care should be taken that you don’t cross the line with several SEO techniques like guest blogging and link building, keyword stuffing etc. since the threshold of error on these techniques is very low. Thus as we step into the ear 2015 the best way forward with SEO is to keep it clean and make sure you have a good SEO team with some good content writers as well.

Conclusion

Alakmalak has been in to Web development since quite a while. They have developed more than 2000 websites for client from all around the globe. They also understand the importance of SEO and the role it plays to make the website you develop highly effective and come top on the search list. Their dedicated team of SEO experts have been helping business owners with their websites and continue to do so effectively.

• A detailed guide on what SEO is all about
• Advance Guide to SEO
• Digital Marketing