Tuesday, February 7, 2012

10 Tips for SEO



Write unique content:
Unique content is important too. You need to provide content that has different information than what is on other sites and other Web pages.

Add new content all the time:
Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant content on your site, which also improves your rankings.

Create a great keyword phrase:
The first thing you should do when working on search engine optimization is find a great keyword phrase for that page. You shouldn't try to optimize your entire site to one keyword phrase - instead focus on writing pages for specific keywords and phrases.
Use the keyword phrase in your title tag and in your URL:
The title tag is one of the most important tags on your Web page. And placing your keyword phrase in the title tag, preferably at the beginning, is very important to get that phrase into the search engines. Plus, that puts your keyword phrase as the link in the search engine index. Even if you can't get your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URLs. Search engines read the URLs and assign value to the text they find there.

Have a sitemap:
Way back in the early days of the web, Site Maps were actually a page on your site that showed people where all the other pages were, usually in some sort of graphical flow chart fashion. Most sites have grown considerably beyond being representable on a map, but they’ve found a new lease on life thanks to web crawlers. Submitting a Sitemap XML file to the search engines helps them understand how to crawl and index all of the pages, including the frequency that they change. You really don’t want to have to do this manually since it has to be updated every time a new page is added, so take a look at automated tools that will do it and submit the update.

Use Meta Tags:
These used to be all the rage in that you could define keywords for search engines to use in their indexing. That’s a pretty easy system to game (want to attract attention to your porn site? Try keywords like “free money”), so they’re no longer nearly as valuable as they used to be. There’s a lot of discussion in the SEO community about how valuable they actually are, but the general conclusion is that you can’t go wrong by adding the keyword and description meta fields to your pages, and that they may even be used to display some of the information in search results.

Get inbound links:
You want to encourage as many inbound links to your site as possible since they are factored into most search engine’s ranking algorithms as essentially counting as votes for the autoritativeness of your site.

Almost all inbound links are positive, with the exception of ones from things like known link farms, but you really want to focus on getting other sites to link to your landing pages with the right link text. If we’re trying to optimize the Recipes page of our Tuna Replacement site for the search term “tuna recipes”, it’s much more valuable for outside sites to link to that page with
<a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">tuna recipes</a> as the link than it is for them to link with
<a href="http://www.tunareplacement.com/recipes">recipes</a>. If you have the kind of site where people might want to feature your content elsewhere (with, say, a Tuna Recipes Widget of the Day), consider developing an embeddable form that includes links formatted to match your SEO priorities.

Social Media:
The single biggest thing you can do for your site and boost SEO is to have a social media presence.
Sites like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook and now Google+ are going to be good avenues to expose your site and get people to notice your brand.

Social networks are also the golden goose for brand reputation management these days and for connecting with new audience.

Moreover, search engines like Google started to pay attention to social media and use data from social networks as rank signals.

Internal Linking:
Internal linking of your webpages can be an amazing factor from an SEO standpoint.

It can ensure that your pages will get spidered by Google and other search engines. It can also help to increase the keyword rankings of a given page within your site.

Good internal linking can also help with increasing the relevance of certain keywords that you want emphasized on your site.

Pay attention to usability:
Including site search and 404 error templates on your page can make it easier for your user to navigate.

A 404 occurs when a page cannot be found, but a customized 404 can allow your user to type what they are searching for manually and continue searching or even better, give them a fully customized 404 page with navigation and suggestions. It keeps the reader on your site.

When it comes down to it, we all need a site that contains quality content that can get a lot of links back to our pages.

Focusing on relevant keywords and using those keywords throughout the site as well as interacting with users is the only way to do business successfully.

Tracking our stats and analytics, connecting and making sure users are happy is the way to go, not just through backlinks, SEO starts from your website and then expands, remember that.

For more information or help with your website, please view our website.

CompuWest Technologies is a professional Web design company based in Medford, Oregon. We specialize in best-in-class website design, eCommerce, Web Applications, SEO, and Database Solutions