Five Goals To Improve Your Web Site

Did you ever wonder if there was a way you could do something to do to get people to your web site? There are some simple things you can do to clean up your web site and help to market your business. As you would with your house or car, it is important to apply regular maintenance to your web site to keep it running in tip-top shape. The following five tips will help the search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) find your site. Some of these things require some knowledge of HTML. You can do this yourself or have a search engine marketer fix these problems for you.

Make sure that all of your links/images are working properly.
While this should seem simple enough, so many web sites do not have all of their internal and external links working properly. While you have no control over external links, it is good to occasionally go back and check upon them, since another company could switch their own web site around and no longer have a valid URL. Within your own site, there is no excuse to have an invalid link. You can either check this manually or run a free program found online to make sure everything is connected properly.

Run a spell check over your entire web site.
This is another easy fix when changing text on your web site. Always write what you want to put on your site using a Microsoft Word or other word processing program. This way, you can assure words are spelled correctly before you cut and paste the information into your web site. With the rest of your site, you can do the reverse and copy the information from your web site and paste it into your word processing program to ensure spelling.

Add ALT attributes to all of your pictures.
Search engines look for ALT attributes on your pictures. What is an ALT attribute? The ALT attribute is an alternative image tag for non-visual browsers when they come across images. This means that the text – or ALT attribute – will be seen when the image is not visible on the page.

Many browsers will also display the ALT attribute if you hover your mouse over the image. If you embed a link in the image, it is good to write out the link as your ALT attribute. Be brief in the text you write for your ALT attribute. You don’t want the viewer reading a paragraph of text on your web page when they hover over a picture.

Add keyword meta tags to each of your major pages.
Keyword and key phrases are essential to your web page. They let the web spiders know what the most important words on your page are and how to find you when searching on the internet. You should think about the words that would best describe the elements of the page you are on when coming up with keywords.

Also, be specific when coming up with your key words and phrases. If you are a bookstore, using the key word “book” is not going to help you very much. “Book” can reference many things in addition to reading materials. It could mean “scheduling a flight or music act”, “an accountant’s spreadsheets”, or “slang for moving very fast”. All of these things would come up if someone typed the word “book” into a search engine. Specific content, such as the book title, or even “paperback book” are better keywords to use when coming up with your keywords on for the page.
Set a schedule to add your link to new places each week.
Your web site’s ranking is partially dependent upon incoming links. These can be obtained by adding your link to other people’s web sites, bulletin boards, message boards, or blogs. Be careful not to add too many links, though, because search engines do not want your link going out to web sites that do not relate to your own site, they view too many links at once as spamming and thus, you get penalized for this. So choose your incoming links wisely and get your name out. By setting your self to a schedule of 5 new links per week, you will have your name all over the web in no time.

So there you have it. Five simple ways to help the search engines find your web site. This is only a few examples of how you can better your web site. Feel free to add your own.