There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best way to create a website SEO strategy will vary depending on your website’s content and market. However, some general tips that may be useful in creating an effective SEO plan include:
-
Research Your Competition
Before you can start optimizing your website for search engine listings, you first need to understand what factors are important to ranking well in Google and other major search engines. One of the most important things you can do is survey your competition (both online and off) to get an idea of which keywords, phrases and topics capture the attention of your target audience.
-
Build an Effective On-Page SEO Strategy
Once you know what keywords to focus on, it’s important to make sure that your website content is optimized for those keywords and includes relevant anchor text links back to your homepage (and other key pages on your site). This will help indexing engines find and rank your content more effectively.
-
Optimize Your Images for SEO Impact
If you want people to take notice of the photographs or graphics used on your website, make sure they’re properly encoded using image formats like JPEG, PNG and GIF. Not only will this help improve image loading speed on search engines, but it can also result in higher rankings for your images when people do a Google search for that specific phrase.
-
Include Links to Your Website on Other Sites
Aside from including links back to your homepage and other key pages on your website, you should also make an effort to include links to other sites that are relevant or complementary to your content – especially if those sites have strong SEO performance themselves. This will help keep the traffic flowing towards your website and provide additional opportunities for you to rank high in Google and other search engines.
Five Easy Steps to Generate a Sitemap for Your Website
- Use the Google Site Map Generator to generate a sitemap for your website.
- Upload the generated sitemap to Google Search and use it as your search engine optimization guide for positioning your site on various pages of the Web.
- Check out some tools that offer automated walkthroughs of how to create and use Sitemaps, such as Sistrix or Yahoo! Site Explorer Widgets .
- Try using an XML-based tool like SOXLITE (actually developed by Microsoft) if you want more control over exactly what goes into your sitemap.
- Finally, make sure to blog about or publicize the creation of your website’s Sitemap to help promote it and attract more web visitors!