Search engine optimization is an important part when it comes to internet marketing. With search engine optimization your website will receive a consistent flow of large pool of free traffic in vast amount which unquestionably will ends up into a big business.

The five steps described below will give you a better idea about how to optimize a website to perform better in all of the major search engines. If you followed these steps properly you will find your website search engine position has improved significantly depending on you industry competition.

Step 1 - Submissions

Step 2 - Title and meta tags

Step 3 - Monitoring

Step 4 - Social book marking

Step 5 –Testing

Step 1 – Submissions

Where to submit:

oSearch engines

oWeb directories

Major search engines to submit

Google.com | yahoo.com | Msn.com

Major web directories to submit

1.Yahoo (paid)

2.Dmoz.org (most important)

3.http://www.about.com/

4.http://www.incrawler.com/

5.http://www.jayde.com/

6.http://www.wowdirectory.com/

Step 2 - Title and Meta tags

Once you have planned and completed the website structure and content integration, now it’s turn for title meta and description. Unique and optimized title and meta tags are however more helpful in achieving higher search engine positions.

Title: The title tag represents information of page and this can be in browsers header bar.

Meta keywords: This include the targeted keywords for that particular page

Meta description: The meta description shows on the SERP (search engine results page). It is used in describing the products/services you offer to your customers, you can describe specific pages within your website that shows in the search results page.

You can describe your pages the way you want them to be seen by your visitors in the SERP (search engine results pages)

Next is alt tags, Alt tags is a white hat SEO practice used commonly by search engine optimizers

An example of alt tag:

Step 3 – Monitoring

There are three basic things in the monitoring process. They are:

Monitoring your search engine positions:

You can go through the searches manually or you can use software like IBP to check your rankings or else you can use many online SEO tools like some of them listed here http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

Monitoring Back Links

Schedule weekly checks of how many backlinks you have and are your link partners still linking to you.

Monitoring Changes in the Search Environment

The last thing you will have to monitor is for changes with the search engines themselves.

Visiting forums and subscribing to newsletters to keep you updated about search engines algorithm changes.

Step 4 – Social bookmarking

The social bookmarking is used by many people to bookmark their pages and websites. Using the social bookmarking visitors can bookmark the sites listed in the social networking websites. The popularity of any websites in the social bookmarking world is gauged by most favorite websites among the visitors. The most bookmarked website obviously will get more traffic than any others website and it can also help improving your search engine ranking in major search engines.

How does it work?

In a social bookmarking system, visitors store lists of Webpage URLs, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.

Most bookmarking websites allows you to enter multiple tags for your web pages in order to be searched by the visitors that help social bookmarking visitors to get relevant and accurate search results for their keywords.

Advantages

1.Social bookmarking helps in promoting your website when any visitors marked your website.

2.It indirectly helps by building a brand.

3.Generates targeted traffic.

Some important social bookmarking sites

Dig.com | Blink |Del.icio.us |Digg |Furl |Google |Simpy |Spurl |Y! MyWeb

Step 5 - Testing

You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now its time to see if all that hard work done has achieved the main goal of reaching the visitor and to convert them to a customer.

oCheck for broken links :

oOther script errors

oEase in navigating site

oVisual appeal of the site

oPlacement of content

oAre you easily able to find what you are looking for

You have created a great design and added SEO elements to your site. Now you should test your website for errors (i.e. 404 not found error, script errors etc.).