More visitors to your website brings more opportunities for you to increase your revenue. But how do you get more visitors to your website?An optimized website is one way to help improve your rankings with Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.

There are many reasons to make website optimization a priority. For starters, websites are often your company’s first and only chance to get infront of new business prospects. If your site doesn’t show up early in a Google search, prospects may never find you.

Here are some of the key aspects involved in website optimization.

Meta Tags – Metatags, titles, keywords and descriptions all help to improve search engine ratings. Each is critical in determining how your site appears with search engines. Meta tags let you specify the keywords that you want the search engines to use to categorize your site.

Keywords Selection – How do you choose the all important keywords? One way is to try Google Keyword Suggestion Tool which indicates the popularity of any chosen keywords. It provides the estimated number of times that a term/keyword was searched on in the previous month. Another is Overature’s Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Keyword Density – Keywords on a web page are not enough for search engine robots. Ideally, they should also be a reflection of the text that’s on that particular page. Keyword density refers to keywords actually embedded in the text of a given page. The thinking here is – the higher the keyword density the greater the ‘value’ for the visitor.

Reciporical Links – Links from other sites will help draw new traffic to your site. In addition, links to your website on a number of other sites will help increase your site’s ‘relevancy’ with a number of search engines. It is interpreted as improving the ‘value/experience’ for the visitor. Link Popularity is a tool that wil indicate how popular your website is. It will indicate how many links with Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Type in any web site and see how popular it is.

Content Updates – New content, useful tips and noteworthy news articles give visitors a reason to return. Search engine robots will consider a site to be ‘stale’ if it does not periodically refresh with new content.

Search Engines and Online Directories – Promotion of your site to all major search engines and relevant online directories should happen on a regular basis.

by John Bergdoll, Creative Solutions, Inc.