Search engines have tremendous power over the success or failure of any on-line business.  Webmasters can use these SEO strategies to their advantage and optimize any websites for increased SEO resulting in greater brand recognition.

SEO Strategy #1-Optimize the website’s linking structure

The web pages’ linking text structure is one of the most important aspects of SEO, Visitors to your website depend on being able to navigate freely.  If a website is confusing or difficult to navigate, it will lose site visitors.

Search engines put a lot of importance to a site’s anchor linking structure. Good anchor text makes linking easier and allows search engine “spiders” to navigate freely throughout the site without getting stuck. This will help prevent engine spiders from stopping in the middle of indexing your website.

Here are some SEO linking tip examples:

A static text link looks like this. <A href=”myPage.html”>My Link Text</A>

Add your keyword phrase inside this anchor text linking it to a relevant web page like this: <A href=”/seo/seo-articles.html”>browse through our large selection of free seo articles</A> In this example notice the link text as well as the directory (named articles), and the page name it is linking to, all have the same keyword phrase. This will significantly increase SEO.

Google highlights the key search terms present in a website’s “URL.”  Google also takes key terms from a URL’s body text content whenever there are no key search terms present in the site’s URL.

This is why naming your own links with key words/terms on each individual web page is so important.  Adding your keyword/phrase 3-5 times into the link text and having 15-25 inbound links present increase SEO.

SEO increases whenever the text link has been embedded inside a readable paragraph.  Please note that this does not take the place of other key terms in the paragraph text.  There still has to be a menu for navigation that will contain some of the same links.

Here is an example of embedding links into a body text:

<H1>Since 2000, Superior SEO Inc. has been the on-line industry leader providing clients with free SEO information</H1>
<P> Superior SEO Inc. has been developing SEO articles, tools and software for webmasters worldwide. The business began as… Please <A href=”/seo/seo/-articles.html”>browse through our large selection of free SEO articles</A></P>

SEO Strategy #2-Improve navigation for site visitors and search engine spiders

Link every important page on your website to every other important page on your website. Leave no important page unlinked. This is crucial to SEO.  But, note important pages do not include single purpose pages that do not need cross-linked.  These might include pages such as a site thank-you page following a purchase.

All single purpose pages do need links back to others on the site so visitors can navigate freely. Whenever important pages use this strategy, the search engines’ robot spiders have no trouble indexing your website.

SEO Strategy #3–Build the site’s text menu as basic as possible.

The static link (text) menu is important and is easy to build. It can be as basic as the links shown at the bottom of the web page.

You can use a fancy JavaScript or DHTML menu, but it is not recommended.  If you decide to make a fancy menu, incorporate both JavaScript and DHTML. Search Engines don’t read content within <script> tags because it can cause their systems to crash.  If possible, place the static text menu toward the top.  If this looks bad, it’s not worth doing. Most site visitors are more likely to trust a professional looking web site and doing this will end up being counter-productive.

SEO Strategy #4–Build a “Site Map” containing every important link to your site.

Make sure the layout of the site map makes sense and is easy to navigate so site visitors are able to find what they are looking for quickly.  Add a link on your site map to every page on your web site. It is still possible to build a fancy- looking site map that is search engine friendly using static links.

SEO Strategy #5–Avoid query strings.

If you must use query strings, try to keep them as short as possible.  They will significantly slow down your site speed and SEO.  Search engines are slow at indexing dynamic pages with query strings.

These pages use scripts like asp and cgi and query strings containing special characters like”?”, “&” and “=”.  Query strings are picked up by search engines, read and then indexed. But this is done extremely slow and cautiously to avoid engine spiders becoming trapped and crashing.

After things go smoothly the first time, they will index more query pages, but again, still very slowly. If you must use dynamic pages, create static links to those pages for the search engine spiders to follow.

Using these SEO strategies will increase indexing speed and optimize your website for greater brand recognition as your site improves in search engine ranking.