Search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, rely on computer robots called spiders to scan the internet for good sites.  Your website needs to be optimized both for your users and for search engines. This optimization is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

The MOST important thing you can do to optimize is to have good content for your users. Good content does not mean verbose content. It means that it is relevant information that gets to the point. You may have heard of “keywords”. Keywords are phrases that users type into a search box to search for your site. There are many methods to find out which keywords your users are using and I will get to those in another post.  Relevant information means that you talk about the subject that the page references which includes your keywords. Your page must not overuse, or spam, your keywords or the search engines will ban you. On the other hand, it must use it a good number of times, or the search engines will not think your page is related to your keyword.

So, what determines what is a good number of times to use your keyword? Well, here is where good SEO research comes in. You need to study your industry and your direct competitors to find out the average number of times they are using the keyword. You then need to stick to that average in your website content while simultaneously maintaining your content legible by regular users.

Welcome to the new Ally Web Design Website and Blog!  Here you will find a lot of valuable information to make your website successful. Success is measured in many ways, but the most important way is in terms of traffic. If no one is visiting your website, then none of your other goals will be attained. Simply having a website online doesn’t automatically mean you are going to get visitors. There are many aspects to this, both on your website and off. On your website, there are structure rules you can follow to make sure that your website is enabling search engines to actually see your website and crawl it. Off your website, you can make sure your URL (web address) is being linked to from important sites in your industry. These are the types of issues I will be covering in this blog and I hope you will join me and add to the discussion.