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Home / Features & Articles / iWorld by Sharad Agarwal

iWorld by Sharad Agarwal

What Every CEO Should Know About SEO

Every self respecting business has a web site. Not more than 2% of the sites drive targeted traffic that they deserve. Are you in the same predicament?

The answer lies in SEO, i.e. 'Search Engine Optimisation'. Basically you need to be found in search engines when people are looking for you. If you are buried in the myriad of pages, just forget it. All the precious dollars that you spent building that jazzy, interactive site are just not worth it. You need to invest in getting found on the internet and found pretty quickly to get noticed.

Here are some tips that will help you generate bottom line results.

1. A great place to start is the Overture keyword suggestion tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. This helps you to select the right keywords that people are using related to your business on major global search engines. Once you have narrowed down to about 20 keywords based on frequency of occurrence, have them imbedded as 'meta tags' in your web site. A quick way of checking what your web design company has done for you is to go to the 'View Source' option in your browser and check the currently deployed meta tags.

2. What is equally important is to ensure that the main 'phrase that pays' is part of your web site's title bar. All the 100 characters (including spaces) should be used including your USP. This is where Google while indexing decides priority of search results. Check your site headers at http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php.

3. Content is king on the web. Ensure that all your web pages are tagged with keywords to increase the frequency of occurrence. A good place to check your keywords densite is at http://www.googlerankings.com/kdindex.php. A judicious call has to be made here, cause an overzealous webmaster can get you blacklisted by intelligent crawlers!

4. Create 'Doorway Pages' to help rankings. These are basically non content pages with meta tags that direct browsers to the index/home page. This again has to be tactfully done, since Google recently threw out BMW site from its engine for trying to con the Google search logic for showing up BMW in all 'used cars' results.

5. Internet is about networking. This means you should be well linked, hyperlinked from other sites on the web. These could be your suppliers, customers, business associates, industry portals, newswires etc. A quick check of how well your site is networked from other sites is to go to Google and use the Advanced search option. In the 'Find results' menu, key in your complete URL in the 'With the Exact phrase' field and select Google Search. The results of this exercise are a litmus test. Many a so called successful web site owner has been embarrassed by the results generated through this simple test.

And finally, if you find that all the above is a bit too complicated for your liking, simply call a professional web development firm to help you. I promise you one thing, These will be the most precious dollars that you ever spent on the web.