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How to get to the top of the

search engines (SEO)

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Topics Covered

1) How search engines work

2) What search engines are looking for on your site

3) Researching keywords

4) Optimising your website so that it gets to the top

of searches. How it gets to the top of searches.

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How Search Engine Works

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How Search Engine Works

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How Search Engine Works

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How Search Engine Works

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What search engines are looking for on your site

Social

Backlinks

Technical

Content

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Social

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BackLinks

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Technical

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Content

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Researching keywords

Getting started with a brainstorm list

Acknowledging that you need a keyword research tool

Refining your list using suggested keyword phrases from ananalysis tool

Verifying keyword phrase relevance

Looking at search volume to determine consumer demand

Analyzing the competitive space to make sure you and thesearcher think the keywords mean the same things, and to decide ifthe space is too competitive

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Ensure Your Site Has High-Quality Information

Help Search Engines Find Your Site

Encourage Others to Link to You

Identify the Keywords For Which You'd Like to Be Found

Place Keywords in Prime Locations

Ensure a Search-Friendly Web Site Architecture

Keep Your Site Fresh

Optimising your website so that it gets to the top of searches

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Ensure Your Site Has High-Quality Information

The cornerstone of any optimization strategy — or just a good Website strategy, for that matter — is a lot of great, relevant informationtailored to those you'd like to attract to your site.

A large volume of high-quality content helps with a number of thesteps listed below — for instance, you're more likely to haveinformation that's useful to any particular person, you're more likelyto include the key phrases for which people are searching, and othersites are more likely to link to yours.

Not to mention, of course, that a terrific site is more likely toengage the people who find you through search engines, andencourage them to become not only repeat visitors, but friends ofyour organization.

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Help Search Engines Find Your Site

Search engines read through huge volumes of information on theWeb with software programs called "robots" or "spiders" (becausethey navigate, or "crawl," through the Web).

These spiders create an index which contains, essentially, all thepages they've found and the words that are contained on them.

You need to make sure your Web site is included in thoseindexes. You can easily check to see if your site has been indexed byGoogle's index by searching "site:www.yourdomain.org" — i.e.site:www.idealware.org.

This search will show a list of all the pages from your site that areincluded in Google's index (ideally, every page on your site).

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Encourage Others to Link to You

Links from other sites to yours are a critical aspect of searchengine optimization. A couple of links will help the search enginesfind your sites, but lots of links will show them that your site is acentral, important resource for particular topics.

The more incoming links you have from credible organizations(that is to say, organizations that show up high on search enginesthemselves), the higher you will be listed in search results. To checkto see the links that Google has indexed for your site, enter"link:www.yourdomain.org" into the Google search bar. Theresulting list doesn't include every link from every site, but is a guideto the approximate quantity of high-quality links.

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Identify the Keywords For Which You'd Like to Be Found

Identifying the keywords that people are likely to use, and forwhich you'd like to be found, is a critical step in search engineoptimization. You should ideally think through keywords not justfor your organization as a whole, but for each content page thatmight have useful information for your target audience.

What phrases are associated with your organization?

How are people currently finding you?

What search phrases are people using in your domain

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Place Keywords in Prime Locations

Headlines and section titles

Link text

Page title metadata

Page description metadata

Page text

Page URL

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Ensure a Search-Friendly Web Site Architecture

Ensure there's a simple link to every page on your site

Include content early in each HTML page

Use standard header tags

Be careful of duplicate pages

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Keep Your Site Fresh

Search engines love new pages. Try to add new stories, reports,news releases, and the like so that search engines feel that your siteis frequently updated and thus should be frequently indexed.

If your site is rarely updated, it can take months for search enginesto find your infrequent new additions.

Blogs can be a particularly useful way to easily add new pages toyour site — and can also provide great information that encourageslinks from others.