SEO Tips & Techniques
When you are ready to start optimizing your own site, there are some SEO tips that can really help point you in the right direction. Although at first SEO techniques may seem to be very difficult, once you get used to it, it’s really not all that complicated. These tips will help you optimize your own site just like a pro and they’ll greatly increase your chances of getting a much higher ranking with search engines.
We’ll divide up these tips into categories to make it easier to implement on your own site. You can look at this list as a road map for your own needs and use it as you see fit. Besides using the below SEO techniques, you need to focus on quality content. Content is king, so be sure to have well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keywords or keyword phrases.
The Technical Side
1. Meta Tags - For our first search engine optimization tip, we’re going to focus on meta tags. While they may not be as popular as they once were, they are still quite useful. If you are not familiar with meta tags, they are keywords that are hidden in the code of your page. Search engines can see and read them, but your visitors cannot. By choosing the right keywords for your meta tags, you can increase your ranking on search results and help a search engine index your site more appropriately.
Get together a list of ten to fifteen meta tags that accurately represent your site. Check them for popularity and weed out any that simply aren’t used a lot. Steer clear of adding popular keywords that have no bearing to your site. It may work at first, but you won’t be getting targeted visitors and that is the name of the game.
2. Page Title Tag - The title of each page on your site is vital to your SEO efforts. Each page will need to have a unique title that accurately describes the content contained in that page. It is a good idea to use your company or site name in the title as well. For example, you can use: Discount Athletic Shoes - My Company Name, if you are a shoe store. Notice I have placed the company name at the end. This is just a tip as company name searches are very few.
The reason that page titles are so important is the fact that this is what will be displayed in the results section of a search. For example, let’s look at two possible page titles that would be displayed for the above mentioned shoe store.
Discount Athletic Shoes - My Company Name
&
Page2
If you were a search engine user looking for discount athletic shoes, which one would you be most likely to click? Put yourself in the shoes of your searchers and name your pages so that they describe what you have to offer. This will increase not only your ranking but it will deliver very targeted results.
3. Site Maps - Search engines need a site map to help index your site properly. This will tell them what content you have and how it is organized. The spider will also be able to find new content much more quickly when you are utilizing a site map. Since this needs to be written in XML for a spider to understand it, we recommend using a site map generator. There are numerous free tools for this purpose and Google also offers one. By using a site map you are making your site much more search engine friendly and increasing the chances of more frequent indexing. By creating a video sitemap in your Google webmaster central account, you get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers.
4. Your Robots.txt file - This is a file that is not used as often as it should be. If you have duplicate content that you don’t want indexed, or you want to create a no follow rule for specific areas of your site, you need one of these files. If you are using a CMS, one should already be generated for you. If not, there are generators online that will walk you through each step of creating your file.
5. Multimedia Tips - Use keyword rich captions with your images. Ensure you have keyword focused content/heading surrounding your images/videos. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo Image ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
Frames, Flash and AJAX are not SEO friendly although search engines are modifying their algorithms rapidly to spider these as well. But minimize or avoid Frames, Flash and AJAX as much as possible.
6. Internal Linking - Internal links are as important as external backlinks. Make sure you use important keywords in your anchor text for your internal links.
The Creative Side
1. Keyword Optimization - It took awhile, but we’re finally here. Keyword optimization is the single most effective tool for getting a better ranking. You’ll need to pick keywords that are popular, related to your content and effective. Avoid the practice of overusing or “stuffing” your keywords. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once. By adding these words into your content, you’re telling the search engine what is listed there.
2. Selecting the Right URL - It is important to pick a URL for your site that uses keywords that are relevant to your content. If you already have a URL that is not optimized, don’t worry. You can always buy a second one and have it point to your existing URL. This is a very effective way of increasing your chances of being ranked in the top 30 results for any search engine.
Your URL file extensions such as .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. won’t make a difference with respect to SEO.
3. Updating Your Content on a Regular Basis - This is a crucial SEO tip. Search spiders like fresh content. The more content you add, the greater your chances are of being included in a search engine directory. The more often you publish it, the higher your chances are of getting a very good ranking. Search engine spiders are sent out on a regular basis, but they don’t index every single site on every single pass. They focus first on the sites that are already known to add content regularly on their first pass. By updating your site on a regular basis, you are literally training the spider to come by and index your content more frequently.
4. Use a Blog - If you have a catalog site or your products really aren’t well suited to adding new content every day or every week, consider starting a blog to discuss your products and your company. This is something you can publish frequently.
5. Link Building - When link building, focus on quality and not quantity. One single link from an authoritative site is more valuable than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you in the long run. Links from High PR sites or .edu carry more weight. Build a network of quality backlinks using your main keyword phrase as the anchor link text. The quickest way to get your site listed in search engines is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
These 11 simple search engine optimization tips are the keys that you need to get a better ranking in any search engine. By combining all of them into one plan for your site, you can be assured that you will be indexed regularly, your content will be included and you’ll be ranked higher than sites that fail to implement these strategies. However SEO is not a one-shot process. You can expect SEO algorithms to change regularly and hence work on your optimization daily.