Search Engine Optimization Tips
Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users find Web sites. That’s why a Web site with good search engine listings may see a dramatic increase in traffic.
Everyone wants those good listings. Unfortunately, many Web sites appear poorly in search engine rankings or may not be listed at all because they fail to consider how search engines work.
Low traffic rank sometimes makes us think “what am I doing wrong?”. One of the reason is because search engines don’t know how to find your page or you don’t have the right keywords for them to put your page in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Reasons of this is that you are not putting valuable keywords in your website.
Putting valuable keywords makes some sense and can give your site a boost of traffic specially if you have a good topic because if you have valuable keywords and a good topic then most likely search engines will put your page/site in their SERPs. For example I searched about how to make money, this will deliver thousands of sites in the SERPs and if you don’t have valuable keywords then your site would be likely at the bottom of it.
There are many ways to improve your site’s searchability and I will include the things I know best. There are 2 different ways and they are called On-Page and Off-Page SEO. On-Page refers to things you can do to your website, Off-Page refers to the things that happen to your website from other sites (incoming links from other sites). Let’s start with On-Page SEO since you can do these items immediately and test the results.
Title Tags
If you have familiarity about SEO then I know you have seen this one coming. The fact is, and this has been proven, what you put in your title tags is the most influential variable to determine how your pages show up in SERPs. With Google you can make a change to your title tags and within 24-36 hours you will see the results.
Keyword Density
Keyword density was listed the second most important on-page factor in the 80/20 of SEO activities. Keyword density is the percentage of times the keywords appear on your page.
Site Structure
Site structure covers the way your site is linked together internally. It would take a very long time for anyone to explain all of this things but I will make it short and I will tell the most important element of Site Structure, sitemap. Building sitemap is free so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it. For WordPress users you can download a plugin and use it to generate a sitemap for your site.
Internal Links
Google treats each webpage as a single page, not as a part of a website, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important you take good care to optimize your keyword linking methods. The two most important things to consider is how you anchor your internal links (what phrases you use to link) and that you take advantage of all the opportunities to link your pages together. For example, use your footer to link to your important pages using the appropriate keywords (including your sitemap).
Meta Keywords
Meta Keywords is an important part too. Meta keywords can handle keywords as much as the title tag. You can put description using meta tags and by far as I know It is also an important part of a website’s <head> tag and as far as I know most of you know about Meta tags so I will not include it here anymore.
Image alt attribute
The alt attribute is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify text that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. You can also use it as a part to optimize your search engine rankings but it won’t contribute a lot.
Title attribute
You can use the TITLE attribute for just about any page element, but it isn’t required for any page element. Use it to describe links, tables, individual table rows, and other structural HTML elements. They’re more versatile than the ALT attribute and many search engine ranking algorithms read the text in TITLE attributes as regular page content.
Now, we will go through Off-Page SEO
Links and PageRank
Links to your site is the most important Off-Page SEO technique. Incoming links are what determines your natural search engine placement. On-Page SEO techniques can influence the variables but the links will determine your website strength to compete with other high ranking websites in SERPs.
PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.
One way of building incoming links and PageRanks is to submit your site and get listed in the best directories, DMOZ and Yahoo for example, and then slowly, but consistently build incoming links from good relevant sites. You need to be patient in this field because it will take longer than you expected it.
Site Reputation
One site’s reputation is a must and you should never let it go down. Site reputation is one you should say to a blogger “Post original content” and it also refers the value of the site linking to your site. Every website has a reputation and incoming links determine that value, but it’s not about the incoming links instead what the quality and reputation of the site that links to you.
Don’t forget not to over optimize your whole site because Google has a new technology algorithm that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This most likely to be of over used of keyphrases, spammy links, spammy content, so be sure not to do it or your site will go down the drain.
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.randombatch.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.randombatch.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Google]](http://www.randombatch.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.randombatch.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Windows Live]](http://www.randombatch.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/windowslive.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://www.randombatch.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://www.randombatch.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
Related Posts
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
[...] bloggers don’t think much of SEO but for me it is well worth knowing some basic SEO principles, after all, people will most likely go to search engine to search for the information they want on [...]