There are a huge number of SEO tips knocking about on the internet. Knowing which ones to focus your attention on can be a daunting prospect. Hopefully these ten useful tips will help you identify the most important areas.
- Identify Correct Keywords Every Internet marketing campaign should start with identifying the keywords that are searched for, and are relevant to what your website offers. You should consider keywords that your prospective clients would actually type into the major search engines.
- Don’t Try To Trick Search Engines There really no quick tricks to getting and maintaining a high search engine position. The key technique is to develop a website rich in resources to your target market, and feed the search engines ever increasing demand for quality content.Trying to fool the search engines will only get you penalised or even blacklisted.Don’t spam, don’t use hidden text, avoid link farms, and don’t cram your keyword descriptions and META tags with keywords. The penalties will far outweigh the short-lived advantages.
- Ensure navigation is structured & meaningful A high-quality link structure on your site will not only help visitors browse your content easily, it can also ensure search engine spiders can find and index all pages on your site.Not every visitor will start at your home page, but most will and it is important to check that each page on your site is linked to the others. This helps the search engine spiders to quickly index all the content on your site. Use HTML text for navigation (not just pictures, or flash etc.), and use keyword rich relevant anchor text to help explain to the search engines what the linked page is about.
- Develop Inbound Links Developing high quality, relevant links to your site is vital to achieving prominent search engine rankings. They are used by Search Engines to evaluate how valuable a website is and consequently where the site should be ranked.Submitting your website to online directories can be a useful and relatively quick method of increasing your inbound links.You should also seek inbound links from other relevant and well regarded websites. Blog about your business, write articles, write comments and add your business to social networks to increase your inbound links.Use keyword rich anchor text for your links, vary the anchor text and keep it natural and meaningful to avoid looking like a spam bot. Try to be selective when choosing link partners. Certain sites, known as “link farms”, can harm your ranking and may even result in you being blacklisted by the major search engines.
- Optimise Page Titles & Header Tags Use your selected keywords in your page titles and header tags. Use your keywords, avoid prepositions and conjunctions where possible (the, and, for, with, etc.) and watch your punctuation.Keep titles short and to the point to avoid watering down your relevance. It can sometimes be better to rank highly for one specific keyword or key-phrase, rather than be ranked in a mediocre position for many.Ensure each page has a unique title tag and H1 tag. This will assist your search engine rankings and help users to find the relevant information they were looking for.
- Fresh, Unique Content Why do you have a website? Is it to provide information or entertainment? Is it to promote your business? Do you have an online shop? Whatever the function of your website, it is unlikely to be there just to attract search engine bots.Websites that are designed for people, offering easy navigation and fresh, unique content will attract search engine spiders that will want to index the pages.Visiting a site for timely information, only to find that it hasn’t been updated for weeks can be frustrating.
- Meta Tags There is much debate regarding the value of META tags. They are certainly not a very valuable method of SEO any more, but some search engines still regard META tags as important when ranking your site whilst others ignore them.The best advice is to still include META tags as part of your SEO strategy, but to understand that they are not the be-all-and-end-all, as some would have you believe.
- Optimise Every Page Each page should be optimised for the content it contains. Search engines see the internet as a collection of web-pages not websites.Optimising each page relevantly will allow potential visitors to find the information they are looking for. Ensure you have links between pages to ensure that you whole site is indexed. That way you will be in a position to compete for more than one keyword in order to attract people searching for your goods and services.
- Include A HTML Site Map for humans & XML Sitemap for the Search Engines A HTML site map can help your visitors and search engine bots to navigate pages on your website but should not be confused with an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is primarily intended to manually inform the Search Engines of each webpage on your site (it is not really intended to be seen by humans).It will help your website pages get indexed quickly and efficiently and is also a useful means of updating the search engines as soon as you add new content.
- Use clean standards compliant markup, and optimise your code Validated standards compliant code will not only ensure your website displays correctly users, it will also mean your content is easier to read for the search engines. A good code to content ratio should always be maintained. Bloated code effectively dilutes your website content for the search engines.Separate your styling from the content, externalise javascript and put your most important keywords to the top of the page content.
Summary:
Getting your website to rank highly in the search engines isn’t about quick tricks and hidden secrets. The search engines work by providing their users with the highest quality content relevant to the users search, therefore you simply need to make sure your website provides the content your target audience is looking for.
If you can create a wealth of relevant information that your audience wants to find, you will be rewarded with high search engine placements.
Some great tips here, thanks for the help!