Anyone with a website knows how important search engine optimization is. Keeping your rank up and climbing should be the goal for everyone online.
Here are 10 basic tips to get you started with the proper SEO or your site:
Monitor where you stand – You won't know if your SEO efforts are working unless you monitor your search standings. MarketingVox suggests that you keep an eye on your page rank with tools like Alexa and the Google toolbar. It's also important to check your referrer log regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they're using to find your site, according to PC World.
Keywords, keywords, keywords! – You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it? The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords, PC World notes.
Link back to yourself – There is probably no more basic strategy for SEO than the integration of internal links into your site — it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages, SEO Consult says. You should make it standard to link back to your archives frequently when creating new content. MarketingVox advises that you also make the anchor text search-engine-friendly: “The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms.”
Create a sitemap – Adding a site map — a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site — makes it easier for spiders to search your site.
Search-friendly URLs – Make your URLs more search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords.
Avoid Flash – Flash might look pretty, but it does nothing for your SEO. According to the Search Engine Journal, “Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page… Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.”
Image descriptions – Spiders can only search text, not text in your images — which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible. Start with your image names: adding an “ALT” tag allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your site. Perfect Optimization explains an easy way to do this.
CONTENT – Your content needs to be fresh — updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic. One way to ensure that your site gets new content on a frequent basis is to integrate a blog. “Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless!” the Search Engine Journal suggests. An executive blog is an excellent way to reach out to your clients, create more opportunities for internal and external linking, while giving your site a more personal voice.
Social media distribution – A CEO blog is just one element of social media distribution, an important SEO strategy according to SEO Consult. You should be distributing links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms. Whether displayed on your company's account, or recommended, re-tweeted, and re-distributed by someone else, this strategy exponentially muliplies the number of places where visitors will view your links.
Link to others – An easy way to direct more traffic to your site is by developing relationships with other sites. PC World suggests that you personally ask the webmasters of well-respected sites if they'll include a link to your site on theirs. Be sure to return the favor — then everyone wins!
Besides making sure the SEO company you work with has a good reputation it is important to watch for keyword stuffing. If you use too many keywords or use them unnaturally it will get your site ignored by any search engine crawls. If your site is not crawled on a regular basis then it will not hold or continue to rise in rank.
Do you have any suggestions from experience for site owners to master SEO and gain page rank?
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