Database Systems Journal vol. 1, no. 1/2010 23 SEO Techniques for Business Websites Alexandru ENACEANU Romanian-American-University In the world of website marketing, search engines are an essential key to success. They are the most important way to bring traffic to websites. Understanding how search engines work and what they require is an important first step to harnessing their marketing power. There are proven methods to search engine marketing involving website design, content adaptation, and keyword strategy. The primary goal of these methods is to bring traffic to your site. The secondary goal is for that traffic to be targeted to your product. In the internet marketing game, exposure is essential. But marketing efficiency requires effective exposure to the right prospects. Keywords: SEO, search engine optimization, pagerank, business website, Internet Introduction for inclusion, and have editors review 1 When first building a website, you submissions for fitness. are excited to get it up on the web. You The most common methods of SEO are anticipating how to handle all the new include on-page optimization or utilizing business that will be generated by thousands keywords and meta tags and link strategies. and thousands of visitors. Cut to a few weeks Here are some steps to take in order from not later, and you realize that no one is finding being listed far away from the top or not being you! listed at all: Surely, by the time you have made the 2. Search Engine Submission plans for the new website, you have heard that The first thing to do is submitting the you must use some technique named search website’s homepage. Many search engine optimization to be found on Google or engines will promise to find and crawl the rest Yahoo. of your website automatically. But if they Concepts : don't disagree from doing so, submitting SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – a several of the important pages will help. For subset of search engine marketing that seeks example, a site map is definitely something to to improve the number and quality of visitors submit, since it should have direct links to the to a web site from "natural" ("organic" or rest of the website. "algorithmic") search results. Also, it is recommended to ask for another PR (PageRank) - a link analysis algorithm webmaster to link the new site to his already which assigns a numerical weighting to each submitted website. That way the search element of a hyperlinked set of documents, engines will recognize that this resource has such as the World Wide Web, with the changed. purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied WHERE TO SUBMIT to any collection of entities with reciprocal It is recommended to submit your home quotations and references. page to the major search engines individually, Web directory - a web directory is a at least initially : directory on the World Wide Web. It - Submit to Google specializes in linking to other web sites and http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue/add categorizing those links. Web directories often url allow site owners to directly submit their site - Submit to Yahoo 24 SEO Techniques for Business Websites http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/re with your backlinks and overall accuracy as a quest website. - Submit to MSN After DMOZ, here are the most important http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submi list of directories to be listed in : t.aspx?FORMWSUT • Yahoo Directory website A Yahoo account is needed to submit to the submission ($299 annual fee) Yahoo search engine. Immediate results https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/reference/submit/ should not be seen immediately. Your site • Business.com website submission should normally exist in MSN within about 6 ($199 annual fee) weeks, in Yahoo in 8-12 weeks, and in http://www.business.com/ Google within about 3 months. • Best of Web website submission In the long run, Google will normally give ($40 annual fee) you about 60 - 70% of the search engine http://www.botw.org/ traffic if you follow the hereafter steps. • wowdirectory.com website There are several services that do groups of submission ($25 lifetime fee) them for you - and is a big time saver for the http://www.wowdirectory.com/howtoadd.php rest of your site. The following is one of the • LOCAL directories from your own free and well-known website submitter: country http://www.freewebsubmission.com/ . There are specialized directories that focus on a particular category of links. These can be 3. Directory Submission valuable - you will just have to do a bit of A web directory is not a search engine, searching to find them. These may be and does not display lists of web pages based considered as part of your overall strategy. on keywords, instead it lists web sites by Being listed in a search engine doesn't category and subcategory. The categorization guarantee that you will have a good ranking - is usually based on the whole web site, rather this is just the first step - letting them know than one page or a set of keywords, and sites that you exist. are often limited to inclusion in only one or two categories. 4. Technical recomandations The first directory to submit into is DMOZ ( http://www.dmoz.com/add.html ) a.Site Design which is closed for submission for the Use the "Keep It Simple" principle. moment, but all people hope it will come up Employ an external CSS file, clean again . The Open Directory Project is the up any Java Scripts by referring to them largest, most comprehensive human-edited off the page in an external file, don't use directory of the Web. frames, use flash the way you would an This is a massive directory that is image, and no matter what, do not create a republished in several other websites. It is flash site. managed by volunteer humans, and is Page Size - Your web page's speed is therefore considered to be of special relevance important to your visitors and the search by other search engines (especially Google). engines, because the robots will be able to Read all their rules before submitting - and spider your web page faster and easier. Try follow them closely. Make sure that you try to your best to keep your web page over 5k and get listed in only one category - the most under 15k in size. relevant one for your business. It can take a month or two to get listed, but it really helps b. Validate your site Database Systems Journal vol. 1, no. 1/2010 25 Run a website validator on the pages External links could be reciprocal or one- intended for submitting - to keep the search way links. Reciprocal links should be engine spiders from choking on your website. avoided, because of the Google’s new policy (http://validator.w3.org/) to ignore reciprocal linking – named JAGGER. c. HEAD part of the page There are a number of tactics for building Title Tag - The title tag is the most one-way links: articles, press releases, paid powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so links. use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact Digging for External links keyword you used for the web page that you Instead of looking around for nice are trying to optimize. Every single web page sites, and then asking if they're interested in a should have it's own title tag. link exchange with you, just scout around and Keyword Density - This is also vital and look at where other people are getting links should be used with research. You should use from. Visit a site that's similar in topic to your the keyword(s) once in the title tag, once in site (competitors). the heading tag, once in bold text, and get the Go to Google.com and type density between 5% to 20% (Don't over do "link:www.nameofyourcompetitor.com” (this it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and will list all the pages that have links pointing high on the web page, keyword(s) should be to the current page). in the first sentence and in the last one. Click on every link, opening each one in a new window. Close all the pages with Page d. Internal links Rank less than 5. Internal links are the easiest to attain links. Visit the remaining sites and see if they That would be, the ones right there on your accept subscription or paid advertising. own site and those which you have total and complete control of. Properly used internal f. Site Map links can be a useful weapon in your SEO Build a site map with a link to each of arsenal. your pages. Keep it up to date. This will allow The internal linking structure can: the spiders to get to every page. Do not - Insure that your website gets properly include session IDs in the links advertised. spidered and that all pages are found by Session IDs confuse search engines. the search engines Submit it to search engines or put a text - Build the relevancy of a page to a link to the site map on the main pages. keyword phrase - Increase the PageRank of an internal page g. Short URLS Your web pages should be no more than Keep the URLs short with page names three clicks away from the home page. Link to having the keywords that best reflect page’s topic related quality content across your site. content. Use a delimiter like underscore or This will also help build you a better theme dash to separate the keywords or products through out your web site.