Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients for getting large amounts of traffic to your website besides high-quality content. Because once your articles are a few weeks old, the majority of the traffic to those articles will come from search engines. That's why it's important to rank high in search engines.
In this article I'm going to describe the 10 basic SEO tips that you should keep in mind when writing a new article or developing a new website to make sure your blog ranks high in the search engines.
The title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people. Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.
Please keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters(about 8 words) of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have a page title that's too long. Source: Google – How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?
Note: WordPress users should use the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you the ability to easily place the title of your post in the beginning of your title tag.
Having an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling wp-admin and plugin folders.
Here are some more resources about the robots.txt file:
The
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images, they can however read
Here's some more information about alt tags:
The anchor text is the text inside your tags that links to other pages. Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link is going.
So avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt both your website and the website you're linking to. One more thing to keep in mind is to keep the characters in your anchor text under 55.
While most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a high pagerank links to your website in an article.
Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100 unique outbound links on a single page.
More articles about linking:
Here's a few things to keep in mind when using header tags:
More articles about header tags:
Your first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.
If you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place it in the meta description, which is the text that search engines display under the title of your page.
An accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server, validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select other websites to visit.
Use tools like:
To know if your site contains broken links or when your site is down.
The URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like example.com/p=981489894.
Furthermore, when using Dynamic URLs try to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very important(ie. have a large amount of inbound links).
More articles about SEO Friendly URLs:
If your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility, navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a web designer to redesign your website.
Those who are trying to get their website on a search engine should realize that while popularity is a part of the equation, there are many other factors to how search engines rank web sites for the search results. While each search engine will have it’s own way as to how it filters results, there are four things that every search engine relies heavy on for its results.
Keyword Frequency
The main thing that search engines are looking for is the page (or pages) that offer the most information on the topic. This is determined by the frequency of the key words available on the actual website. If someone searches for “SEO tips”, the search engine will look for the websites that have the best frequency of “SEO tips” available; too little will garner no results, and too high of a frequency may have an adverse effect.
Keyword Location
Another thing that search engines are looking for is the actual location of those specific keywords. The search engines want to know how soon the web page is actually getting into the information that the person is search for. If the keywords appear toward the top of the page, the website will rank higher. If the keywords do not show up until later in the page, they will rank low, or will not even rank on the search engine results at all.
Spamming
Many people take the idea of the keyword and over-do it. They try to place the keyword on the webpage as much as possible. To protect results against this, search engines will actually cut out results that are deemed to have too many keywords. They feel that the web page is attempting to “spam” the search engine by simply featuring multiple keywords excessive amounts of time without actually having information about the specific keyword.
Popularity
Search engine results do take popularity into account when ranking the websites for keywords. Those web pages that rank high on results but are not often clicked on will find that they are dropped on the results page. This is something that is not controllable, as it simply relies on how often your link is chosen when shown on a search engine results page.
Summary:
Trying to get a website to show up on the top results of a search engine’s results can be difficult and confusing for many. While getting the results wanted may be easy for certain topics, it may be incredibly difficult for others. Taking all of the aspects of how search engines rank web sites can help you to understand exactly what needs to be done to rank as high as physically possible on search engine result pages.
