There are many businesses that specialize in Search Engine Optimization techniques, but defining your own keywords and phrases allows you to contribute to your site's ranking as well. Brainstorming ideas, including phrases, words, and adjectives can produce some good results. Remember to consider who your target audience is and try to pre-empt what words they might use to try and find you. In this section, we'll look at some strategies you can implement to help your site in the SEO rankings.

Making sure the content within your site is fresh and of interest to your core target audience is a good way to get started. Frequently updated sites can achieve better indexing results. Write well and make your Articles text based. Search engines prefer words over images. If you include images, you should also include a description of them or make them link to another site or Article. Include keywords in your written content and use them in your metadata information.

Link building

Reciprocal links are very helpful. They are links to other websites, which link back to your site—outbound links that are reciprocated with inbound links to you. Google considers site popularity as part of its ranking process, so sites with lots of hits are often found at the top of the index page as well. Remember to have the outbound links open in a separate tab or window. You don't want to lose your viewer to another site, because they may not come back to you. When the viewer closes the external site, your site will still be open and they may just take another look around before leaving. This also increases the amount of time they spend on your site, which helps as well. We'll look into this further when we look at Google Analytics.

Adding an external link to an Article

Let's embed an external link within an article on the home page of the Party People website. The link text will be the name of a catering company, rather than typing in the actual website address. You can also embed an image within your article to make this your link as well.

1.  Create a new Article, using the Article Manager.

2.  Type in the paragraph of text, including the words that will be the actual link to the external website.

3.  Select the text to apply the link to and click the Insert/Edit Link icon in the text editing toolbar to open the dialog window.

4.  Type the website address into the Link URL box including the http://www.

5.  Select Open Link in a new window in the Target box.

6.  Type in the Title for the link, for example Delicate Delights.

7.  Leave the Class for now.

8.  Click Insert to add the link to the Article.

Adding an internal link to an Article

Cross linking your Articles also makes it easier to find related material on your site and there is an extension available to do this. We'll add a link from the same Article to the what's New in Store section using the Linker component. If you don't have this component installed, then we can also add the link manually. The following steps show how to link to an Article using Linker:

1.  Open the Article using the Article Manager.

2.  Select the text or image you want to link from.

3.  Click the Linker button at the bottom of the text editor.

4.  Navigate to the Article in the pop-up box that appears.

5.  Click Configure link.

6.  Choose same page for the Page target, as this is an internal link.

7.  Click Get link to apply the link to the text.

The following steps are given to add a link manually:

1.  Navigate to the existing Article from the front end of the website.

2.  Copy the URL for the link from the browser address window.

3.  Open the Article in the Article Manager from the administration interface.

4.  Select the text or image you want to link from with the text editor.

5.  Click the Insert/Edit Link icon in the toolbar.

6.  Paste the URL into the Link URL box.

7.  Select Open link in same window for the target.

8.  Add the Title and click Update

You can also ensure your Article titles are links as well. This works when you have a

Read More link from an Article on the home page.

Posting links with your web address to any forums or bulletin boards you visit can also help. While I don't advocate signing up to everything and anything just for this purpose, it can be a good way to spread the word if you pick the right forum, one that is relevant to your needs. Link popularity is important to search engines such as Google. The more sites that link to yours can mean a much better ranking. Also, Google provides a free service called Google Analytics which you can use to analyze the traffic to and from your site. Google AdWords is another useful application that includes a tool that identifies keywords you can use to add to the metadata page and potentially help with improving your search engine ranking. You will need to set up an account with Google to access these tools.