Steve Wildeman is a leading search engine optimizer at Corporate SEM. In this video, he gives us more SEO techniques, focusing on website and webpage search engine optimization.

Even until now, one of the main concerns of internet marketers managing websites is putting their sites on top of the search results page. Through SEO and marketing, this can be done. But even as tactics change and strategies bend with the market trends, one thing hasn’t changed and that is the steel importance of the website content.

Quality content is still a top requirement for a great website. Remember that the online community’s main purpose of surfing the Web is to garner information and data. Having great and unique content will help you get visitors and get you to rank better within the search engines.

Research: It is sometimes difficult to come with new ideas to create a great content. This blockage can be opened with research. You should first determine what your content will be all about. Then search for data and information on your topic. Do not forget to include related terms and a couple of popular search phrases in your content (phrases like “How to” or “Top 10”). These terms and search phrases can help attract the search engines and search sites when they crawl the Web for content like yours.

Using Images, Graphics, and Videos: Visual content is also a popular trend among the users. They will like your site better if it has images, graphics, and videos to entertain them. When your site is all text and words, it might seem boring and sometimes intimidating. Another reason to use images, graphics, and videos is because they can also make it easier for your readers or viewers to understand your content and website.

Deliver What’s Needed: Make it easy for the users to get what they need on your content. Think about the most important things they want to know first hand from your website. Don’t make them scourge around your website over and over because they’re trying to search for something they cannot easily find in your content. If you have additional information and content that cannot be inserted in your site content anymore, you can always link out to other sites and resources.

Get Them Involved: As much as possible, make your content encouraging and inviting. Give them the opportunity to say what they want and make comments. This will give great value and interaction to your website.

SEO: Do not neglect optimizing your site and content, of course. Your content won’t be read if it isn’t exposed. To be exposed in the ever competitive search engines, you need SEO. The main component that your website content needs to have is the keyword or keyword phrase.

Make Your Content “Linkable”: Link building is a great search engine optimization strategy. To make your content “linkable” to the users and other sites, always deliver fresh and unique content. Make it as entertaining as possible. This is why good content ideas are very important. Quality website content is still, and most probably will always be, king.

Here’s a complete presentation by Avinash Kaushik on Web Analytics approaches. We all know how Web Analytics is a very essential tool to improve websites and online sales. This video shows Avinash Kaushik at Google Conversion University as he talks about the complex importance of Web Analytics.

In the business of online marketing, it is important for webmaster to go through and tweak the different components of the Web and the business to give a good boost to the company. But as online businesses are complex, no one can really say that you can create the perfect structure for an online business.

Nevertheless, both the online businesses and search engines make efforts to improve on the the quality of websites and boost sales. Search engine companies have also invented many useful tools for webmasters to use with their SEO strategies. One of these tools is Web Analytics.

What is Web Analytics? It is one of the essential tools that webmasters can use to improve the performance of their websites. It helps the webmasters understand their target market demographics, and also contributes a lot in increasing the Return of Investment for the online business. With Web Analytics, you can track down useful information like the number of visitors that go through your website, the most and least popular of your web pages, your visitors’ locations, and many more. It generally gives you a summation of how your website is doing everyday.

Web Analytics can give the details needed for SEO campaigns and strategies. Important factors like keywords and web pages can be considered and improved as Web Analytics can provide which keywords are most used and which are not. Pages of your website is also evaluated. You will also be able to find out who has linked to your website or web pages, and referrers who have sent traffic to you.

Of course, in studying your target market, the length of time and amount of visits from the users is also considered. You’ll be able to gauge who are really interested in your site and your company. You can also find out which pages they were most interested in and improve upon your website using these data. You can also use this to either change or delete any existing bad pages on your website. You can say that Web Analytics gives you information on both the strengths and weaknesses of your site.

Here’s a video that shows you different websites that offer cheap website designs and solutions. These sites are especially helpful to small businesses that seek affordable website design sites.

Extensive SEO and outsourcing services may be fine for companies and establishments that have the money and manpower. But unlike the big guys, some small businesses may not be as lucky as they would want to be to be able to afford SEO services. This would mean that they would have to rely on themselves. A tight budget would also bring in limits to what they can do.

But there is actually a way to reach the goal of reaching the customers and be within the scope of the limitations at hand. The main point of the strategy would be to direct your SEO efforts unto your target market only.

1. Make a Plan To Promote Your Content.

Content is an important aspect of every website if they want to achieve high rankings in the search engines, thereby achieving exposure and reaching their customers. This is why your content has to be very informative and easy to understand for the users. But aside from making an effort in creating great content, you also need to put in some effort in promoting that content. You cannot solely rely on the search engines if you want to be noticed by your target market.

This is why creating a plan to promote your content is as important as making great content. With this plan at hand, you will be able to plan out specific optimization techniques, social networking ideas, and promotional schemes. Your marketing project will become more targeted and will be distributed to channels related to your business.

2. Make It Easy to Publish and Promote Your Content.

Many business websites are fairly static, and being static doesn’t help in increasing your rank. You would want to have new and fresh content always in this case. New content everyday also helps in promoting your website itself because of the additional web pages and internal links.

Promoting new content doesn’t have to take that much effort and time. Most companies make use of a blog software and employ a person to post on the blog part-time. Small businesses can also do this; it would result in added exposure to the online community and the part-time job will not cost that much.

3. Social Networking

Social networking sites are free and very helpful in SEM. The main purpose of social sites is, of course, to socialize with the online community. You can see how much of an advantage it will be to your business if you socialize with many people through the social sites.

Create an account, make friends, participate in polls, give votes and comments. With the amount of visitors the different social sites attract everyday, your business will definitely gain some exposure and recognition.

4. Develop Massive SEO Tactics

Once you’ve made progress with your content and socializing skills online, it is time to bring your promotional plan to a bigger venue. Directing your efforts on your target market still, broaden your marketing strategies to involve the greater sphere of the Web. Add more SEO techniques and improve upon marketing your website.

Never forget to focus on the appropriate channels of distribution that are related to your business. Targeting your market is still critical, especially since there are limitations to your promotional plans.

Everyone tinkering with the Internet will eventually be learning about HTML, especially the basics of it. Here’s a video showing and explaining how to do simple and basic HTML.

Other than the site content and link quality, search engine crawlers also look into the HTML of a site. When it comes to the structure, the engines like the sites search-friendly. Now most of us don’t really like dealing with HTML. But it will help improve the development of your site. It certainly can’t hurt to learn at least the basic HTML guidelines for SEO. With this, there are certain things to be done and certain things to avoid.

1. Look over your page and check that at it a well-formed HTML or XHTML page. By well-formed, we mean that it meets the W3C standards. You can use the W3C validator tool or the SEO Worker validator for this.

2. Control the size of your page, not too small nor to big (not less than 5K nor more than 15K).

3. Check the page loading time of each page. Make sure that important ones (if not all) load fast. Restrict the loading time to a maximum of 8 seconds.

4. Don’t stuff a page with several links. Keep it to less than a hundred.

5. Keywords are still key. Use your keyword or keyword phrase in the site navigation structure.

6. Don’t forget the title tag! It’s one of the most important SEO techniques. Your title tag for each page should be composed of the strongest keyword or keyword phrase that best describes the page. As much as possible, choose keywords or phrases that should be a part of the page title.

7. Meta tags are also important for better SEO. The Author Meta Tag can help in getting your name or the name of your company in the top spot of search results.

The Description Meta Tag is used to describe the page; it doesn’t really do much to improve the page ranking.

The Keywords Meta Tag can help the search engines in organizing the page and site so that a visitor can easily find it. There are search engines that put a limit to the number of keywords that meta tags allow, so the use of quality keywords or keyword phrases is encouraged.

Robots Meta Tags is used to indicate to the robots visiting the page if it can be indexed. Not all robots follow this anymore though.

8. The heading tag also contributes to better SEO when relevant keywords or keyword phrases are used. As much as possible, keep the usage of the h1 tag to one per page.

9. In using ALT tags, it better not to use it too much because your site could drop from the search results. This tag is better used when linking to an image.

10. In using images, be careful to add the keyword or keyword phrase as part of the image filename. If this is not possible, then put the keywords outside the images or within the ALT tags.

11. Use keywords or keyword phrases as anchor text when linking, especially when linking your page internally.

12. Links that are related to your page or site are rated higher by the search engines. So choose only relevant links to have a positive impact on the search engines.

13. Adding bookmarking icons on your page can help with generating traffic on your page or site. Users and visitors will be able to bookmark your pages and spread word across the Web because of these icons.

14. Selected keywords or keyword phrases should be used throughout the page. It specifically should be in the first few sentences and in the last one, in the title tag, in the heading tag, and once in bold text.

15. It is better to have your links and primary content near or at the center of the page, as this will be more relevant than having them at the corner of the page.

There are many more pointers for HTML guidelines that can help with SEO. For more information and more tips, go to SEO/SEM Journal.

Great search engine optimization cannot only be achieved through efforts on online marketing and site promotions. The structure of your website can also affect the way search engines would be able to crawl on your site, thereby improving your rankings. The structure of the site also makes it possible for you to easily target your market.

SEO/SEM Journal has enumerated several ways to improve the structure of your website and make it possible for the search engines to crawl over your site better.

1. Check and see that your site adheres to the W3C standards.

2. Make the site hierarchy flat and the site navigation simple. Pages should not be more than three clicks away from the homepage.

3. Carefully plan and categorize the pages of your site. Create separate structures for the different categories, putting in specific keywords or keyword phrases for better exposure to the search engine crawlers.

4. A web feed is a document or channel wherein its content has web links to longer (or the original) versions of it. Make sure to provide Web feeds to allow visitors to subscribe to them.

An example of a Web feed is the RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an XML based feed most commonly used in news, blogs, etc. RSS allows you to link to your pages and subscribe to the updates. It is automatically updated whenever new information is entered.

5. Don’t forget to add a sitemap. A sitemap contains the lists of links in a site and allows the search engines to crawl smoothly over your site. Keep the number of links in the sitemap within 100. If you have more then it is advised to have multiple but separate pages for your sitemap.

6. Robot.txt is a file that either permits or denies access to robots or crawlers to the different areas of your website. Search engine spiders and crawlers first look for this file before crawling around your whole site. But there are some that overlook this file and continue to crawl, and this should not be because it’s protocal to look over robots.txt first.

7. HTTP status codes like ‘404 Not Found’ should be handled with care to avoid getting removed from the search engines. For example, in cases of pages that after some time may become irrelevant or is not available, it would be better to redirect the user to a related page instead of using a 404 status code. This is to preserve link equity at the same time still offering what the visitor wants to view.

For more about proper website structure guidelines, click here.