The 7 Most Important SEO Tips

[ad_1]

SEO is essential for your business if you want to ensure that people who use the search engines, in effect everyone online, can find your site. A top ranking virtually guarantee your site is a success.

Here’s Seven Top Tips on achieving that.

1. First you need to know your Keywords. That means you must brainstorm, and work out what words people will use to find your site. You can also “cheat” and monitor your competitors sites to find out what keywords they use, try spyfu.com. The usual process is to use a keyword tool, such as Google’s, or nichebotclassic.com

2. Keywords should be sprinkled liberally throughout your text, in your TITLE tag, in your DESCRIPTION, and if possible even in your DOMAIN NAME and PATH. You can also put them in the ALT images of any graphics on the page and in the filenames of other elements such as pictures and downloads. Don’t overdo it though as you can get penalised for using too many. And make sure your page is human-readable. All to often people can be over zealous with their descriptions and the resulting prose is a little mind-bending.

3. A good linking strategy means you have a number of other sites linking to yours. If possible, use anchor text so that the link itself uses your keywords: E.G. “Fly Fishing” linking to FlyFishingTips.com – but again don’t overdo it , vary the links.

There are a number of ways to get links. You can swap links with other relevant sites (a two-way link) even though a one-way is considered a higher value by the search engine. You can include your link wherever you can post comments (such as relevant blogs). You can write articles that include your link (which will appear in directories and on other sites). You can submit your link to special indexes, and you can even pay for links which is technically frowned upon by the search engines. A link from an authority site carries immense weight to yours.

Links from your blog can effect your rankings, so many blogs utilise the “no follow” tag, which instructs search engines not to count that link.

If you can, also try to get links direct to sub-pages within your site. This is known as Deep Linking and can help your efforts.

4. Don’t forget to include a Site Map. This can be as simple as a HTML page listing all the links at your site, to a full XML map that is submitted directly to Google. There are many free solutions to automatically create these XML Sitemaps. If you use a blog, consider using a plugin that maintains your sitemap for you.

5. Try to keep the code at your site clean. Software such as Word will create very convoluted HTML code for the webpage, other tools fare better. The cleanest code will always be created if you do things the hard way – by hand!

6. Age is a strong indication of a quality site. If you don’t have the patience to work on your own long-term project there is a shortcut: Buy an existing site or even just buy an expired domain name.

7. Avoid duplicate content at your site. If you use third party articles, try to modify them to fit your site. And if you actually write the articles, keep a different one for your own site to the one you pass on to others. 

Note this can be a problem with blogs, since content can be duplicated across the domain, but there is a search engine tag that may be used called “canonical” which denotes the webpage that is considered the main copy. Again, at blogs, a plugin can control this for you.

[ad_2]

Source by Stuart Reid