What are the components of SEO?

Analyze Your Competition - Where do you rank?

The first step to understanding your SEO campaign is to analyze your competition in the major search engines.

See where their website ranks compared to yours. Are they higher in the SERPs than your website for the same competitive keywords? If so, ask yourself:

• Why are they ranked above me?
• Is it because they have more overall content?
  
• Is their content more keyword-rich than mine?
  
• Do they have more links pointing to their website?

Whatever the reason may be, research it; understand it: as they say, "Knowing is half the battle." In the battle of top SERP rankings, knowing this information about your competitor will help you enhance your own SEO campaigns.

Content Development - Search engines love content!

How do search engines determine what websites go where in the SERPs? They have search engine crawlers that analyze your websites content and gauge how relevant it is in relation to a user's search.

Content Development is very important in this regard, as it can either help or hurt your website and its search engine ranking. Your page content should be carefully and uniquely crafted for every page of your site. Each page should include keywords relevant to the objective of a particular page (without keyword stuffing!).

Content development can be a sensitive subject for some business owners; some feel websites should not be too wordy, while others feel that without enough content, you'll lose a potential sale due to uninformed visitors.

Find a happy medium between these two extremes by writing informative, keyword-rich content that doesn't overwhelm your readers. Aim for enough content to provide information to your users and to the search engine crawlers without being too verbose (read: boring).

Search Engine Submission - Performing Manual Submission

Many search engine robots will crawl your website and index it automatically... but it's also important to perform manual search engine submission of your site on your own.

Certain search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN encourage this, and allow you to manually submit a sitemap of your own website. All you'll need is the URL of your website to make the submission.

Not sure how to go about the sitemap submission process? Get in touch with Hudson Horizons today and ask about our automated sitemap submission services.