How to optimize your website for search engines

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Introduction

Your company's blog or Web site can be great PR for you -- or it can be a big waste of time. If people can't find you when they're looking for you, any effort you put into your site is wasted.

But if you believe much of what you read online, you'd think that search engine optimization -- SEO -- is a mystery that can only be revealed upon paying thousands of dollars to a firm that specializes in the field. A reputable search firms could be helpful to you, but if you're just getting started, you can make a lot of SEO improvements to your own site, with little or no technical knowledge.

In fact, the first step is so simple, you may have already taken care of it: Create a useful Web site full of information your customers need. If people like your site, search engines will too.

Five steps to improve your SEO ranking

• Brainstorm all the keywords someone might use to find your site. Your name, the name of your business, your location, and several phrases describing your business are a good place to start.
• Make sure you are using all those keywords in the text of your pages, wherever they make sense.
• Ensure the title tags of each page on your site include the name of your business, and a couple of keywords describing the page.
• Link to other sites that your customers will find helpful, and ask them to link back to you.
• Update your site frequently (weekly or more often) with new content your customers will find helpful.

Five practices to avoid

• Don't make your copy so keyword-heavy that it no longer makes sense. People won't find your site useful -- and thus, you won't last in search engine rankings, either.
• Don't replicate content on multiple pages. Search engines reward unique content.
• Don't buy the hype when someone tells you you need multiple sub-domains, gateway pages or lots of pages that just link to other pages. Search engines can detect this, and they don't like it.
• Don't try to mislead your site's users. Pages and links should be exactly where they appear to be.
• Don't put invisible text on your pages (text that doesn't show up at all, but still is in the code). Again, search engines frown on this.