Tuesday, October 28th 2008, by Adam Barger

Getting listed on search engines is critical to driving traffic to your website. A top ranked position for a particlular keyword or phrase can drive a ton of traffic to your website in a short period of time. With enough traffic any website is likely to accomplish it's goals and for that reason the competition over keywords and phrases is immense.

For that reason at WebStarts we've included a number of tools into our website builder that will help your site get better organic search engine rankings. With our most recent release of features we've included a tool called the SEO Wizard. SEO is short for "Search Engine Optimization". The SEO Wizard is a tool you can use to walk you through optimizing each page on your website to obtain good rankings on search engines. In this article I will cover the basic functions of the SEO Wizard but I encourage you to login to your account and try these functions for yourself. Pleae keep in mind the SEO Wizard is only available with a Pro Account.

1. Keywords

The first step to any search engine optimization process is determining the keywords and phrases your customers are likely to type into a search engine to try and find a site like yours. For example: if you're a dog breeder and you breed pitbulls you may want to show up for terms like 'pitbull puppies', 'pure bread pitbulls', etc. rather than just the word pitbulls.  To get ideas of what people may be typing into search engines you may want to watch this video I made that shows you how to use the Google keyword research tool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shYn5G1QEZ0

2. Meta Description

Once you've determined your keywords and phrases people are likely to type into your website you'll need to create a paragraph about your website. This paragraph is called a meta description and it tells the search engine what your website is all about. On Google you can see the meta description for a website listed below the title of each search result. When creating a meta description you want to work your keywords into your paragraph in a natural way. If you fill up your description with your keywords and phrases in a way that doesn't make sense to a human reader the search engine may actually give you a lower ranking for that keyword or phrase. So take your time and write something concise that includes your most important keywords and phrases.

3. Page Title

Now that you've created your meta description you'll need to come up with a page title for your website. The page titlle is the information that shows up in the far upper left hand corner of your browser window window when you're on a particular page. If your using Internet Explorer you'll see the page title displayed directly to the right of the blue 'e'. Like with your meta description you want your page title to contain your most important keywords but make sure the keywords are relevant with the content on your page. Once again if your page title, meta description, or keywords are not consistant with the content on your page you may actually get ranked lower by the search engines.

If you have multiple keywords and phrases that you want to put in your page title it may help to separate them by either a comma or a pipe. I prefer a pipe. If you're not sure what a pipe is here is an example of a page title that separates keywords and phrases with a pipe.

Example: Free Webiste | Website Builder | Online WebSite Builder

4. Submitting Your Site To Search Engines

After you've chosen keywords for your website, created a one paragraph description, and entered a page title for each of your pages you'll want to submit them to the search engines. Submitting your site to the search engines let's them know your site is ready to be "crawled". When a search engine "crawls" your website it's gathering all the information about your site and decided how to include it amongst it's rankings. When you upgrade to a WebStarts Pro Account we automatically submit your website to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. So if you haven't already done so I suggest you upgrade your account to the Pro version.

If you do not submit your website to search engines they will most likely never get listed on the major search engines. Search engines only know your site exists from you telling them by submitting your site or by following a link from another website that it already knows about, to your website.

These four steps are really only the beginning of what you'll need to do in order to obtain top search engine rankings. The competition of top positions on search engines is fierce. But once a top position is obtained the rewards are great. For a complete guide to search engine optimization purchase our e-book. It's loaded with tons of valuable information you can refer to time and again. It's a must have tool for anyone who is serious about obtaining top search engine rankings, drving massive traffic to their site, and making a ton of money on the internet. You can purchase your downloadable copy at this link https://webstarts.com/cydec/cart/quickbuy.php?16_1