You don’t need to pay an arm and a leg

There are many companies out there that work hard to ensure that your website meets modern standards for SEO and usability. However, there are a few things you can do yourself, with just a moderate knowledge of web programming. I took the opportunity to test out some of these methods on a dog boarding kennel in Katy Texas which happens to be a client of ours. Their website was not updated for years, and started to fall behind others in a search.

Submit your website to Google

You don’t need to know much about web programming to submit your website to google.com for indexing. Just paste your URL into the form and hit submit. Google will take up to a day to finish processing your website, but after that, you are well on your way to getting a better pagerank. In the meantime, you can set up a Google Webmaster’s account and begin creating things like an XML Sitemap which is used to improve the way search engines crawl through your website.

Use online websites to check your page formatting

Another factor that impacts how eager search engines are to index your page and put you at the top of the results list is whether or not your HTML is actually compliant and error-free. W3Schools has a nice validator that will tell you what line your HTML errors are on. Try to remove all the page errors, and search engines will now know that your content is valid and will provide an appropriate viewing experience.

There are numbers of other SEO and page formatting validators and optimizers out there. Remember, that page load times also affect your pagerank, So keep large images and javascripts to a minimum.

Keep your content fresh

Lastly, the easiest way to keep your place on top of the search engine results list is to keep adding content to your website. Content dosn’t always have to be peer-reviewed, formal, research papers that take you months to edit. Content can be as simple writing a quick blog about what you’re working on, adding new images, or updating links. Web crawlers look for new content in order to decide whether or not they are going to re-index your website. So, keep it new and useful!