What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is a marketing tactic focused on increasing your websites visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. The earlier and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors can then be converted into customers.

Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, adding content, using html to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another tactic.

How do I optimize?

Backlinks – A link to your site from another site.

Backlinks are very important. The more you have the better. The best websites to have links on are sites that end with .edu or .gov.

If you link to a good source it makes your site more trustworthy. Better content to them means a user will be happy when they bump into your site.

Beware: Never use a site that allows you to put your link on for free. Google will find you and penalize you. Google does not allow anyone to pay for links for optimizing purposes.

You can find out how many sites that linking to you at http://ahref.com. You can also use this site take a similar site to yours and see who is linking to their site and then try getting a link to your site as well.

Keywords –

It is very important to decide which key words choose. A popular keyword will not give good result. Food for example is to general. Long tail keyword is to many words linked together. While they may be good because they won’t be so popular; they may not be so many people searching for that combination either.

Wherever can put keywords the better.

Where do I put Keywords?

There are meta tags in the html for keywords that should be put in. There is also a meta tag for author and description (what Google writes on the search results) that should both be used.

When putting keywords in meta tags the earlier words are more important.

Many people put their keywords as the title of their page and as their domain name.

The words inside h1 and h2 tags are more important. In a image tag the alt= should be a keyword.

Where do I find Keywords?

If you have an account with Google AdWords then you can view keywords in the Google keyword planner (GKP). They are showing you keywords that you can buy and get the advertisements on the side for those keywords. You can use those keywords that they are recommending. You can also type in a similar site to yours and get the keywords they are recommending for that site as well.

Soovle.com is a free tool that gives keywords from search engines.

Ubersuggest.org is another site that gets keywords that google suggests.

Keywordtool.io is similar to ubersuggest.org but it also gives more suggestions because it adds on more letters.

Over optimizing

Over optimizing is big problem. Google wants natural/organic result and will notice and give you a penalty for it. They may put you at the end…) So be very careful not to over optimize.

Although we don’t have a search engine optimization offer for you; we are aware of many of the techniques and we try to do what we can when creating our websites.

Getting Started

Every website needs two thing to get off the ground. This is regardless of whether the website is being built on your own or a web development company like Appsenses. These two items are :

Domain Registration
Web Hosting

Although they are indeed two separate process and many will use one company for hosting and one for registering their domains all the web hosting companies that I’m aware of also offer domain registration and visa versa all the Domain registering companies also offer web hosting, i.e. they go hand in hand. Therefore if you are not penny pinching you may be interested in going straight to the web hosting step and signing up with them for your domain. How much money is the gamble ? Domain registering is generally about $10.00 a year, although many Registering companies offer the first year for .99¢ and sign you up for automatic renewal on a juicy price banking on the people that either forget to change the settings, or don’t have the time and or energy to move their domain to another registrar. If you buy it together with hosting it may be like $15.

What is Domain Registration?

Any time you type some www. address into your browser the browser needs to connect to a server (fancy way of saying computer) somewhere that has the files that that website is serving. Now how is the browser to know where and which server to get the files from ? That’s where registration comes in the browser communicates with that central routing address that directs it which server to go to.

What is Web Hosting?

A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data center.

What should I look for when looking for a web host?

Add On Domains :

I put this first because it perhaps is the most important. Many plans have different specifications about how many domains they allow. The Blue Host and hostgator basic plans only allow one website per plan other plans for example Hawk Host allow unlimited add on domains . So if you might be building other sites you definitely want to check that out.

Domain:

Some web hosts include one free domain and others you have to buy the domain separately.

Email accounts:

Some web hosts only allow one email account, some a specific amount and some offer unlimited emails.

Web Space:

Generally refers to the amount of space on a web server that is allocated to website owners by the web hosting companies. It is made up of the total quantity of all text files, images, scripts, databases, emails and other files related to your website. Most web hosting offers come with enough disk space for any type of site.

Bandwidth:

The maximum amount of data transfer allowed each month. Many hosts usually allow unmetered. Some hosts describe unmetered as unlimited, however they may apply limitations under their fair usage policies. For a regular business bandwidth won’t be a problem. For a site that has videos and audio being uploaded it may be an issue.

Where are their servers

If you have a business catering to for example NYC than you would like that your server should be on the east cost . It would lower the efficiency greatly if every get and send request would have to be sent to California and back to NYC.

Cost:

You can sign up for one month or a couple of years at a time. The longer you sign up the cheaper it will be but you will be stuck with them for the term of your contract even if you are not happy.

Which Web Host should I use?

There is a huge market of web hosts. Every blog is making a big deal to recommend certain host or hosts. That is because it is a very heavy affiliate marketed field. That being so each blog not only is promoting their affiliate they are also making a big deal about what their affiliate offers. Which makes things very complicated. What exactly is important ?

Being that that was said I will recommend Hawk Host. We use them and are very pleased with them. When looking for support they answer their tickets in a timely fashion . Their prices are cheaper than the others that we researched and even for a month by month basis it very reasonably priced. Unlimited add on domains is a Huge plus. We have many domains on our $2 something price per month(their affiliate program is not that good they are more focused on giving you the shopper the discount than us the blogger !) . I provided links to other hosts in case someone is already convinced by some blog that they should use go daddy or blue host or hostgator etc.

There are many web hosts available. Below are a few popular web hosts.