I’m always one for giving complete advice and hope to put together a workshop soon, either in person or a webinar – or maybe both, putting my advice into practice and helping you to optimize your website in real-time. I often remember a powerful phrase which has stuck in mind ever since;
I read, I forget; I see, I ignore; I do, I understand
In other words, Learn SEO by Doing!
I’m going to run off some quick SEO tips that, if implemented correctly, should see your site rise in the rankings. Here’s they are…
Write Interesting, Focussed and Unique Content Regularly
Content is King – I’m sure you have heard that a lot in your life, however when it comes to SEO – it really does matter. Search engines live on content – it’s what powers them. So if they know your site gives fresh new content (which is not copied from anywhere) in a regular manner then they will always be back for more. Soon they will realise you know what you are talking about – as long as your content relates to the topic of your website / blog.
Use Headings for Keyword Phrases
Search engines know when you have used a heading or have put certain phrases in bold. To them it means that that phrase is more important than any of the content around it. Therefore, use font styles according to this.
Don’t Choose the Most Popular Keyword Phrase
…use the second most popular instead. Choosing the most popular will put you up against millions of other websites / blogs in the world competing for that Page 1 spot. Choosing a related but not as popular keyword phrase will give you a headstart over all the others.
Make Sure your Website or Blog is Accessible
Accessibility is key for both readers and search engine spiders. Readers need a site that is easy to navigate through and they can find what they want to read quickly. Spiders want the same. They want to crawl through your site which they should be able to do page by page following links as they are presented. A sitemap will help with this as will internal linking between pages – as appropriate.
Use a Keyword Phrase as Your title Tag
Title tags are important to search engines and by using a keyword phrase as your title tag, it will help let the search engines know what that page is about. Remember, use a different title tag for each page as repetition will be penalised as spamming.
Get Links from .gov or .edu Sites
It’s pretty impossible to get these unless you know one of the designers or are affiliated to that organisation but search engines see .gov and .edu sites as the most trustworthy and one link from them to your site is better then 50 links from low ranking sites.
Use 301 Redirects
Make sure that the www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com points to the same site. They shouldn’t be two different sites as that will cause confusion for the search engines. The difference is subtle but effects could be major.
Create a XML Sitemap
Sitemaps are great! If one has been configured for you properly, you will be able to “dictate” to search engine spiders which links you want them to see and what pages to index.
Use ALT text for Images
Search engine spiders can read only text, not images and not animations. So think when the search engine spider crawls through your site and comes across an image or an gif animation do you want it to ignore it or do you want to provide some descriptive text as to what the image or gif animation is about? I would choose the second…and you do that with ALT text.
Write Short Pages
Pages that have less content load a lot quicker than pages full of content and images. The quicker your page loads, the quicker search engine spiders can start to crawl it.
Use a Reliable Webhost
If your web host allows spammers or is down most of the time, then avoid them at all costs! Spammers on a web host are targeted and banned by search engines. Once a server is banned, all the websites on that server suffer. Also if your webhost is down a lot of the time the spiders wont always find a website when they come to crawl and that means they think your website does not exist anymore – and guess what? You’ll get demoted down the rankings.
Use Anchor Text On Links
It’s so important to associate your link (on your page and on other sites) with anchor text. This text tells the search engines what the link has got to go with. Hence, a link that looks like below tells the search engine that the maxtratechnologiesblog.blogspot.com site is an SEO Blog – without the anchor text, how would the search engine know?
Please link to this page: SEO Blog
.com Domains are better than .biz
.com domains and .co.uk domains are a lot more worthy than any other on the internet. Search engines generally don’t rank the others very highly – look for yourself…search anything on the internet in Google and see how many non .com and .co.uk domains come up.
No Broken Links
Ensure you have no broken links and fix any that do break. A broken link is a link that points to “something” whether it is a page, an image, a document etc etc that is no longer there and results in a “Page Not Found” error. Not good! Search engine spiders will follow these links and end up at “Page Not Found” and will swiftly move away from your website / blog and onto crawling the next.
Do Not Keep Editing your Webpages
Editing web content is good – especially if you want to keep it up to date. However, constant minor changes just so that it will be re-crawled by the search engine spiders will annoy the hell out of them. Don’t do it – keep them happy!
Don’t use Invisible Text
You see lots of websites (I guess less so now) that try and keyword stuff their webpages but do it in a way that search engines cannot tell they have done it. For example, using same colour text as the background or covering text with images. Search engines are clever and can tell you are doing this. If caught, your site will be blacklisted from the search engines so be warned!
Pixel Images
Similar to the above, one approach has been to insert an invisible 1×1 pixel image on a webpage and alt tag and link it to keywords. Don’t do it – search engine spiders will hunt you down and ban you.
Go Backlink Crazy
Backlinking is one of the most important success criterion for SEO. Make sure your site has enough of them! I’m not just talking about a dozen or a hundred…I’m talking about thousands which should be built up over time. Too many at one time can be classed by search engines as spamming so build it slowly. I try and do about 20 backlinks per month. Click to read more on how to create backlinks.
Social Bookmark your Site and Pages
Social bookmarking is still a great way to build inbound links to your site and also serve as a search repository for social bookmarking site members to find your site, if it matches their interests.
Use Flat Site Architecture
Flat site architecture is always more preferable to search engines than deep site architecture. If search engine spiders need to go within 2 or 3 folders to access a site then this will have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings. Flat site architecture is always easier and quicker for search engines to access than any other.
Using YouTube to Promote your Site
The popularity of YouTube has made it possible for your website to get international coverage. Video advertising has been found to be very powerful and sharing of videos on external sites has been an extremely popular way of marketing your site. Just think about it – how many times have you seen a great video that you have sent to someone / shared on Facebook, MySpace etc? We’ve all done it – and it works! Best of all – it’s FREE!
Monitor your SEO Strategy
I find it useful seeing how each of the tips I implement myself has an impact on my search engine ranking for keyword phrases. I monitor my position on search engines, check out my Alexa ranking, monitor my monthly traffic and see what search queries are bringing traffic to my site.
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