One of the first questions we always get about someone's site is "How can I improve my search engine ranking?”  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of getting visitors to your site and can be a mystifying subject.  This entry will focus on SEO and give you 5 tips on how to improve the SEO on your site and conversely your page rank. 

Before we dive into the tips, let’s take a minute and discuss what exactly is SEO.  Search engines use an algorithm that takes the word or phrase users are searching for and try to find sites with relevant information.  SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of visitors to your site through the use of a higher search engine ranking.  Search engines are often the first source users will visit when looking for specific information.  The higher you rank, the larger volume of visitors your site will experience.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some tips that will enable you to do some SEO on your own site.  All tips have a basic description, an example and ways to incorporate the tip within the OneNet system.

5 Tips for improving your SEO

1)  Use short, meaningful titles - Picking a good title for your page is an important part of how a search engine views and ranks your page.  Try to limit the title of your page to a few meaningful keywords, rather than a long phrase jam packed with keywords.  The fewer keywords you use, the higher the impact each keyword carries.

Example:  If you have a page that has information about electronic products you sell, you would want to call the page something like "Company XYZ Electronic Products".  Avoid doing something extremely wordy like "Company XYZ Exciting High Quality Inexpensive Electronic Products".   Remember, in the case of the title, more is less.

How to accomplish this in OneNet:  Adding titles to your pages is incredibly easy in the OneNet system.  Simply put the title you wish to use in the "Page Name" field when creating your page and a title will be automatically added to the page.  If you would like the displayed title to be different from the page name you specified, simply go to "Edit Page", click the "SEO" tab and enter the desired title in the "Page Title" field.

2) Avoid using Flash media and image based navigation for main content - Flash media is a great way to jazz up your site and add in some eye candy.  While this does add to user appeal in most cases, search engines could care less about how pretty your Flash looks.  In fact, search engines don't even read the content in your Flash pieces.  When using Flash media or images on your site make sure that it does not comprise the bulk of your content or menus.  In order for search engines to discover what your site is all about, you need to have the keywords in a textual format on your page so they can be found, instead of embedded in a Flash object.

Example:  Ensure all your menus are designed in a text format rather than an image or flash format.  Once you have all the content on your page in a textual format, you can add a Flash piece to supplement the content.  In other words, use the Flash piece as a way to duplicate content in a way that draws the user to it, but make sure that the same content is in a text format on your page

How to accomplish this in OneNet:  All sites designed by Neoreef are done with text based menu systems that are stylized with CSS.  This allows search engines to read the menu and get a better idea of what your site contains.  When adding a custom Flash piece to your site, ensure that you also put information relating to that piece in a textual format using the Text Editor module.

3) Keyword Density - Keywords are used to define what can be found on a specific page of your site.   If you have a particular keyword or phrase you want search engines to take notice of you should aim for a keyword density higher than 3.5.  What this means is for every 100 words make sure and incorporate your keywords or phrase at least 3.5 times.

Example:  You provide a free service on your site to rate local businesses.  For every hundred words you would want to use a phrase like "free local business rating" at least 3.5 times or each of those words individually at least 3.5 times each.

4) Linking - Your sites SEO is based on more than just the content of your site.  A factor in your search ranking is also the number of sites you link to and also sites that link to your site.  If you add links to reputable sites and can get them to link back to you, your site will experience better SEO.

Example:  Your company sells products from a certain manufacturer.  You could place a link to the manufacturer’s website on your own site.  Additionally, you could ask the manufacturer to put a link to your site on their site as a reseller.  This would allow you to benefit greatly from two way linking.

How to accomplish this in OneNet: OneNet comes with an easy to use Links module.  You can add all your links into a vertical or horizontal list.  You can then use the Mirror module and have the same links appear in various locations throughout your site.  This will allow each of your pages to benefit from the additional SEO obtained through the links.

5) Fresh content - A simple way to increase your SEO is by constantly having fresh content on your site.  What exactly do I mean by fresh content?  Well, fresh content is content that has been updated recently (1-2 weeks).  By having fresh content when search engines are crawling your site, you will get better SEO because they keep seeing new content and view the site as a good information source. 

Example:  Start a blog on your website and update it with at least one article a week.  For further expansion on this you could create several unique blogs relative to different information you want to share.  This will allow you to keep a variety of fresh content up at all times.  Additional options are RSS feeds or changing content on pages regularly.  Choose whichever one of these options works best for your content.

How to accomplish this in OneNet:  Blogs are one of the easiest ways to keep fresh content on your site.  OneNet features a blogging module which will allow you to easily setup blogging on your site.  Additionally, we are developing a module for adding RSS feeds to your site, keep an eye out for this feature in the near future!

The tips outlined in this entry should give you a good start for optimizing your site to increase your search engine rankings.  You can use any of the above tips on their own merit.  However for greater results combine as many as you feasibly can.  SEO is an ongoing consideration for every site, keep checking back here for more entries outlining additional SEO strategies and tips.