How to Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)

Now that you’ve built a  website, you’ll want people to be able to easily find and visit your site. and everyone else can find your site easily on Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. How can you optimize your site to ensure you appear as high as possible in the search engine rankings?

Start with the basics.  

Read our Description, Titles and Keywords article to learn how / why to add this information throughout the pages of your site.

While you're doing this, keep in mind that keywords are not made out of magic.  Just because you add a keyword to your site does not mean search engines are going to find you through that keyword.  If life were that easy, we’d all be rich and retired to our own private islands by now.

Get a Google Webmaster account.

Google is far and away the most important search engine (it’s not even close) and a Webmaster account can give you more control over / insight into how they’re ranking you.
Here is the link of Google Webmaster: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Use page names that are relevant to search words and phrases.

The name you provide to a page in Weebly is the name given to that page both in the site navigation and in the address of that page on your site.  Why is this important?  Because if a word is in your address it is seen as more relevant to your site by search engines.  More relevant means more likely to to show up in search results. 

Use keyword phrases in your links. 

If you link from one page of your site to another, use descriptive text for the link. 

Get other sites to link back to your site.

The more sites that link to your own site (as a general rule), the more Google trusts your site to be worthwhile.  Think of other people linking back to your site as word-of-mouth that tells not just other people to check-out your site, but tells the search engines to do the same. 

There is nothing more important to your ranking than other sites linking to you, but there is no get-rich-quick method to get links back to your site.  Build interesting content and let people know it exists.  Just as building a business takes work and time and effort, building traffic to a website takes work and time and effort.

Maintain a Blog. 

A blog enables you to continually add content to your site.  The search engines like to see new content on your site.

And if you want more tips, do a Google search for SEO Tips.  A lot of different people have written a lot of different articles on this topic.  This help article is meant to be a good place to start, but it certainly isn't the end-all, be-all of SEO.  It never hurts to research other sources of information.