How to SEO your own Home Page

Part of our mission here at OCDC is explaining the web to digital immigrants such as ourselves.

Search was a 6 billion dollar business in 2006 and is projected to grow at 12% in 2007. Over 1/3 of all purchases of goods and services starts with an internet search. Optimizing your Home Page for natural search helps potential customers find your info on the web. In this post, we’ll tell you how to do it yourself in half an hour with basic web skills.

Briefly, search falls into two categories:

• Paid Search – this is where you bid on keywords and pay (usually) by the click
• Natural Search – also called organic search. This is where search engines (like Google, Yahoo and AOL) display your info based upon relevancy.

We’re going to focus on natural search in this post. These recommendations are based upon guidelines from Google and other search engines as well as our own experience with SEO. No fancy skills required – just basic HTML.

Here are 7 things you can do to optimize your Home Page for natural search.

1. KEYWORD SEARCH TOOL – The first thing to do is pick your keywords. There are both free and paid tools on the web that can help you research words or phrases that describe your business or service. We use the Google Keyword Tool (which is free). Decide which keywords best match your product or service. We usually pick two or three keywords and concentrate on those.

2. PAGE TITLE - Many people concentrate on the body copy or esoteric measures like keyword density, but search engines also look at the page title (<title> tag). It helps your “relevancy” score to use your main keyword in the page title.

3. HEADLINE - Search engines also pay attention to the headline or <h1> tag. The same is true for subheads <h2>. A common mistake is to use image text (i.e. a gif or jpg) for headlines, but search engines can’t index image text. Use plain text (html) or your headlines won’t be indexed.

4. BODY COPY – Now weave your keywords into the body copy. The hard part is making it sound natural.

5. META TAGS – Search engines also pay attention to Meta tags. You can find these are in the head section of the html. We recommend using both the “description” and the “keyword” meta tags.

6. AT LEAST 100 WORDS - Many search engines don’t index pages with fewer than 100 words. Some “experts” insist that longer pages perform better in search rankings. While this may be have the whiff of truth, we think over-long pages make deadly reading and ultimately turn off the audience and undermine the message.

7. USE LINKS - Linking your keywords between pages on your web site can also help your search ranking (once again by boosting relevancy).

Search is incredibly complicated and it is evolving everyday. But the recommendations listed above will bring your home page into compliance with the major search engines and lift your search ranking over time.

If you have more questions about search, please contact us.