SEO Basics
SEO is easy and anyone can do it. Good website designers and developers have these practices melted into their minds, and is generally required for a site to meet their personal standards. This post only covers basic SEO practices. As you begin to get into more advanced search engine techniques, the lines of SEO and Internet Marketing begin to blur. Do not forget that both of these are important. A search-engine optimized site still needs good marketing to get itself out there, remember to budget for it.
A search engine bot will crawl through your site, following every link it sees and making a copy of the content in the spiders database. It's important to make sure the spider can get at every page on your site. Some webmasters use a sitemap for this, although generally clearly labeled navigation menus do the job just as well.
Use an appropriate title tag. It should be relevant to the content being displayed on the page.
Use H1 and H2 header elements appropriately. The spider recognizes these as header elements and ranks them accordingly.
Don't forget to use alternate text for your images, not only to keep your site accessible, but to add keyword density as well.
Use keywords often, but avoid spamming the word on the page. Carefully and subtly is the key.
Use more text than images. Avoid using images for H1 and H2 elements. Use text-replacement if you have to.
Link to your CSS files externally. Inline CSS can confuse some search spiders.
Have your links contain keywords, and make sure they are towards the top of the HTML document.
Avoid flash content when at all possible - the search engine almost completely ignores it. ( And so would screen readers for the blind )
Using clean, semantic HTML and adhering to standards set by the W3C ( World Wide Web Consortium ) will also improve your search engine visibility.
Keep in mind these are only basic tips, and generally only the beginning. Immerge keeps all of these practices in mind when designing any Web site. The rest is up to you. Having good content is the most important part of your Web site. Keyword dense content that keeps your users coming back and generating buzz is going to help more than anything else we can do. Budgeting money for Internet Marketing is also a surefire way to boost your rank. Targeting a certain demographic on popular social networking sites, using google adwords, and tv/radio campaigns are just as important in contributing to your Web site's popularity.
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