10 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines: Part 1

If you have a website, you would want people to come and visit it (Of course, thats why its up and running!). Search Engines like Google and Yahoo! can be a great way to derive quality traffic to your site, without having to invest heavily in doing so. You can get your website rank well in these SEs by optimizing them. Although its a bit tougher than it sounds, but you can do few things on your own and check the results. Here are 10 things you can do to get your site optimized:

1. Keyword Analysis
This is the most important stage of optimization. If you are optimizing your site for the wrong keywords, then you will end up with:

1. Poor rankings in SEs search index.
2. Poor conversion on your site

However, focusing on the right keywords can make you a king. While choosing the keywords, you need to strike the right balance between keyword popularity and competitiveness. Here are certain tools with which you can carry out the your research

1. Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool: Googles very own tool which lets you have an idea about whats hot and wants not!
   
2. KeywordSpy: Highly recommended! It not just gives you an idea about the popularity of the keywords, but also lets you know which keywords your competitors are focusing on.
3. WordTracker: The most popular and user friendly tool around. Simple to use and easy to understand. The right tool for newees!
4. Technobloggie: It's free! But a little less effective than those above!

2. Page Titles and Meta Tags
After you have decided upon the keywords you want to focus on, you need to include them in the page titles and meta tags. For the page titles, one should remember the following points:

• Keep your Page Titles around 69 characters. If it has to be more than 69 characters, then try to use the keywords early in the titles.
  
• Use Keywords cleverly. Make your page title in a sentence structure which should inform the user what the page is about.
• Stay away from "Filler Words" in the title, if possible, such as "And, If, Or, The, Is, A," etc, etc...
• Keep your title in Title Case, it looks good!

As for the meta tags, they are not so important a few days back until this came on the Google blog. Meta Tags have got three parts: Title, Description & Keywords. You can create meta tags by using this free tool offered by SEOBook.com.