Alex George serves as account director and chief social media strategist for Fixation Marketing, providing strategy, design and interactive services to associations nationally. Connect with him on Twitter at @Alex_Fixation.

If you’re wondering how to optimize your Web site to make sure you are pulling people in to your site as effectively as you could be, consider these essential steps to optimization:

1. Make sure you position industry-specific keywords in all sub-URLs of your Web site.

2. If developing a new Web site, pick a descriptive and specific domain name. xyzlawfirm.com is better than xyz.com.

3. Your site architecture should use a simple and logical navigation. Search crawlers scan all layers of your site — make it easy for them and you’ll place higher in results pages.

4. Use tags and metatags properly — code them into the “background of your Web site,” don’t use too many of them or else you’ll confuse crawlers, and always make sure they actually pertain to the content that’s on the page.

5. Always use keyword-rich anchor text for all links — inbound and outbound — on your site.

6. Create good, original content. Do not duplicate or copy others’ content.

7. LINKING!! Inbound and outbound linking is essential to creating favorability in search engine rankings. But be careful to link only where it makes sense for the content on the page. Search crawlers can identify and punish you for using links incorrectly.

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