My guess is that if you are looking at SEO articles you are a beginner to the subject. Here I will show ten easy ways to better optimize your site for search engines. These tips are not only great for beginners but also for experienced webmasters as well. Check out these 10 Search Engine Optimization tips and apply them to your site. Remember, search engines are not a magic bullet! But they are a good way to drive extra targeted traffic to your site. Getting to the top of any search engine doesn’t happen overnight it takes time, patience and hard work.
1.) Great Content
If you spend all your time worrying about ways to get traffic and no time spent working on content your site will never get any where. If your content is good people will voluntarily give you non-reciprocal links. SEO, traffic techniques and every thing else is secondary, your content is why people come to your site. Even if you do a great job getting people through the door, if your content is bad they wont come back.
2.) “Link to Us” and “Add a Link”
Create a “Link to Us” and “Add a Link” page and add them to your site map. This lets other webmasters who may visit your site know that your are open to link exchanges. Also, you want to make it as easy as possible for other people to link to your site. For your link to us page you should give people numerous options ranging from images to text. Give them the HTML code to copy and paste into their site. You should not iclude codes for images that are on your server, this uses up a lot of bandwidth and can even screw up your website stats by showing more unique IP’s than have actually come to your site. Instead display the image and tell people to right click, save as, then upload to their own server.
3.) Links, Links, and More Links
All search engines take into account how many links are pointing to your site on other pages. You should avoid indiscriminate linking to other sites in unrelated fields as well as linking to sites that aren’t indexed in Google, as they may have been penalized and could get your site penalized too. The best way to get back links is to visit sites with a similar topic, look for a “link to us” or similar page, then look for any contact information for that site. Place their links on your page first, then contact the webmaster of the other site telling them you would like to do a link exchange and where they can find their link on your site. Then ask for a reciprocal link and give them your link info. You should avoid sending your link info in html format because some webmasters don’t like that. Instead tell them your page TITLE, URL, and DESCRIPTION
4.) Don’t Optimize the Wrong Keywords
Your probably thinking that the more times a keyword is searched for the better it is to optimize for that keyword. WRONG! In fact its just about the opposite of that. If you are a new page with little or no page rank its going to be hard to show up for high competition keywords. The best way to decide which keywords to optimize is to divide the number of times that that phrase is searched for by the number of pages that show up for that search on Google. This gives you the search to results ratio. The higher the ratio the better off you are optimizing for that keyword or keyword phrase.
http://www.goodkeywords.com/ - a free software that tells you how often keywords are searched for.
5.) Use a different page title than your URL (homepage only!)
If your homepage URL is “All-About-Horse-Racing.com” you are almost 100% guaranteed to show up as the #1 result for the search “All About Horse Racing”. So why would you want to make that your page title too? If you make your page title “Horse Racing Strategies” you will probably show up for that search as well. Make your page title the exact search phrase you want to show up for. This only works well for your home page, for sub-domains it is a good idea to have your sub domain URL and your page title the same keyword phrase.
6.) Use description meta tags with keyword phrases you want to show up for
In your description meta tag you should use key words and key word phrases you would like to show up for. Your description meta tag and your page title is what a potential visitor sees at search engines.
7.) Use h1, h2, and h3 tags
These tags let search engines know what your most important keywords are. h1 is for your main keywords. h2 and h3 are for your secondary keywords.
8.) Keywords in Unexpected Places
Did you know that search engines don’t only look at the content of your pages for keywords. They also look at your URL, and names of files in your site. Since search engines can’t tell what’s in an image on your site they rely on its alt tag and file name. You can use ANY image for this. Also, put keywords in your URL. All words in URLs and file names should-be-separated-by-dashes.
9.) First and Last Words
Add your desired keyword phrase (only 1 per page!) to the very beginning and end of your page. You are more likely to show up for your desired search phrase if you add it to the beginning and end of your page.
example: http://www.thunderfap.com/daily-giveaways.htm
10.) Bold, Underline, Italicize
Out of all the places you can put keywords you can also make certain words or phrases stick out to search engines by emboldening, underlining or italicizing them. However, don’t overdo it. You should not ‘keyword stuff’. Way back when search engines were just starting, they used to only look at how often a keyword phrase was repeated in a page. A lot of pages climbed to the top of the search engines by just repeating the same words over and over. Search engines have long since changed their tactics, now you may even be penalized for “keyword stuffing”, so don’t overdo it.
11.) Bonus! Check out the Free Webmaster Tools Section of My Site
A list of very useful free sites that webmasters can use to improve their sites ranking and traffic. Back link generators, meta tag generators, robots.txt generators, html error repair, google sitemap generator and much more!
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