Alpha SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making your web site more visible on, and to, search engines. It is vital to the success of your site in that it determines how visible your business is to potential customers.

Choosing a Quality Web Hosting Company
Using a reliable host is very important, and choose one in which you are able to have your own static IP address, which is more favourable to the search engines for technical reasons. Some hosting companies, though, assign dynamic IP addresses, which vary each time someone types in your site’s URL. Free website hosting offers some visibility, but usually will not result in a ranking on the first pages of, for example, google.

Indexing
Generally, search engines index text above images. They use powerful ‘bots’ which crawl the web and which respond favourably to new content and quality text. It is also important to remember that it is your potential customers who will read this text and so it should be informative and engaging for their benefit too! The spiders are more able now, though, to index files such as PDFs and graphic file captions. In order to be more readily ranked by the search engine’s robots, which determine the indexing, it is important to optimize the home page and other pages which sell a particular product, and which have public content.

Importance of the Domain Name
The domain name allows your site to be more visible to target users if it incorporates terms or words which define your area of business. By using Google Adwords Keywords it is possible to select several keywords to then take to a domain name seller. The seller’s system will be able to filter the words and provide you with a list of available names, from which to choose.

Links
It is important to include many back links to your site, in order to rank well. These can be from other sites which relate to yours in some way. Inbound links can also serve to raise your business site’s profile on search engines. You are able to use keywords as anchor text to assist with internal links. This will allow the search engine ‘spiders’ to be aware of what the page linked to is about. Submitting your site to several reputable directories and obtaining links from authority sites in your related industry are also beneficial processes.

Keywords
The use of keywords throughout your site is effective in raising visibility. Main keywords are those which your target market would be likely to use when typing a search into a search engine, for your products or services. Secondary keywords help to further optimise your site, as does the use of keyword ‘stemming’, referring to the use of words from the same root, and also of using synonyms.

Some important SEO factors:
Obtain different backlinks (from distinct domains) with your specific keywords in your anchor text.
Quality can be more important than quantity when it comes to link building. 1 Link from a PR 3 page = 90+ PR1 links.
Getting links from relevant websites with the same subject matter as your site has a greater impact than links from non relevant sites.
Its important to get links from a number of different sources: Blogs, Video Sharing Websites, Social Bookmarks, Forums etc.
The stronger your entire site is overall, the easier your individual sub-pages will rank. Since some of your domain authority is transferred to your sub-pages.
Content from 300 to 500 words seems to rank well.
URLs and titles that are overly long tend to be a bad idea for SEO.
Placing your keywords early in the title, the H1s and in the first paragraph of your content is a good idea for SEO.
Google factors load times of your site in its ranking algorithm.
Domains that match search keywords exactly get greater ranking priority.
Domains with a partial match with keywords are given significantly less ranking priority.
Subdomain keyword match get even less ranking priority.