Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips
Good Search Engine Optimization starts with
good site design. This means understanding exactly what your
site will be offering its visitors. From there you can
incorporate logical navigation, accurately identify relevant
keywords, create useful, informative content, optimize your
tags, create links and keep your site ranked well with frequent
updates.
Here's a few tips on
helping you rank well yet offer your visitors the information
they are most interested in.
Keep Your Site Focused - Don't try to
be all things to all people. Keep your site as narrowly niche
focused as possible. Don't build a pet site that includes all
things for pets, narrow it down to dogs or cats, and if you
can, narrow it down even further to 'dog food' or 'dog
training' or 'dog prescriptions'. Tightly niched sites have
become the site of today. Remember, the more narrowly focused
your website the more likely you are to attract a visitor that
will buy because you are more likely to offer them what they
are looking for.
Website Navigation - Build your
website with navigation in mind. Your readers, and search
engines must be able to find what they are looking with ease
and without frustration. This means good indexing, descriptive
titles, easy navigation.
Use an accurate Description Tag - Use
descriptive page titles. Take time to summarize your page and
create a descriptive page title that depicts exactly what your
page is about. This will encourage viewers to click on your
page link. It will also help the search engines to know what
your page is about, therefore helping it achieve high ranking
among the natural searches.
Use accurate, descriptive keywords
- Select 2-3 keywords for each page of your site
and sprinkle them effectively throughout your page.
Use Wordtracker or a good
keyword tool to find keywords that will bring you the most
traffic and are not too competitive.
Example of tags usage: If you
have a site that sells "pet supplies", here is how good
head, keyword and description tags might look:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet supplies -- Online pet supplies and
pet accessories</TITLE>
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="pet
supplies, pet accessories, pet store">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Online
pet supplies: The pet store that
has a complete line of pet supplies and
accessories that you and your pet
are looking for.">
</HEAD>
Linking strategies Linking plays a large
part in the optimization of your site so don't just link to any
site. You should adopt a methodology in obtaining useful,
quality links. Here's a few useful tips on linking
strategies
Build content pages - Content is
extremely important on the internet today. It's your best
chance for top rankings. The search engines look for it and
demand it. Your challenge will be to keep it relevant,
informative, interesting and useful. But it doesn't stop there.
New, fresh content must be added regularly.
Good Color coordination - Use a white
or light background for your main site content. Don't use dark
colored fonts on top of dark backgrounds, users won't be able
to read your text. Using the same color for fonts and
backgrounds to sneak in more keywords is considered spam so
avoid it. Keep your site theme colors to 2 or three basic tones
and be consistent.
Minimal advertising - Don't build your
site around lots of advertising and banners. Keep them to a
minimum.
No Spelling or Grammatical errors -
Many search engines penalize for spelling and grammar errors so
use your spell checker.
Create a site map. Site maps are like
a table of contents. Site maps can help search engines find,
crawl and index all the pages in a website ensuring that no
page is left behind.
Include a privacy policy - This is
just good business sense. Your viewers like to know that you
are in keeping with privacy policies.
Handy Tip: Read Google's FAQ's.
Google is the search engine market leader and you will find
that most other search engines mimic their techniques. If you
learn how to do well in Google, you will do well within most
search engines.
I do suggest considering doing SEO yourself as opposed to
hiring expensive SEO consultants. First of all it gives you
more control of what's going on with your website and secondly
you're not relying on someone else who may be using black hat
tactics or charge you expensive fees for something that isn't
really providing your with what you need, but good SEO can be
costly and time consuming.
Instead, I recommend doing it yourself with top
proven tools that give you easy control and provide
lasting benefits for what it takes to achieve top rankings.
Here's some preferred options for better
search engine ranking
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