Top 10 SEO Tips

SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some time into finding the best keywords.      

SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors

It's a fact that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them. 

SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title

The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results.

There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my tip for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion.

Bar none the most important tip involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that's interpreted as spam by the search engines.

This one exercise could make or break your SEO campaign. Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don't forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.

SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags

META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines.

Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say "may" because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I've noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. There's also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I've seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don't think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.

The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google's search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).

SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don't waste your time including keywords that aren't used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique.

SEO Tip #5: Use Headings

Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Since a page full of headings would look just plain silly, my SEO tip would be to fill in the blank space with paragraphs, ordered and unordered lists, images, and other content. Try to get at least 250+ words on each page.

SEO Tip #6: Use Title and ALT Attributes

More often then not, web addresses (URL's) do not contain the topic of the page. For example, the URL www.myspace.com says nothing about being a place to make friends. Where a site like www.placetomakefriends.com would tell Google right away that the site being pointed to is about making friends. So to be more specific about where we are pointing to in our links we add a title attribute and include our keywords.  Using the Title Attribute is a direct method of telling the search engines about the relevance of the link.

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the Title Attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually disabled. Here's how you would use ALT in an IMG tag:

SEO Tip #7: Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you'll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It's not confirmed, but many SEO's have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media.

More important is your web page's filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).

SEO Tip #8: Create a Site Map Page

PageRank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique voting system created by Google. I could spend two days trying to explain how PageRank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient navigation throughout your site. That is where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked to the sitemap, it allows webcrawlers (and users) to quickly and easily find content. This SEO tip is one of my favorite of top 10 SEO tips.

It used to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only two clicks. The PageRank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to #1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site.

Feel free to search Google for any of the terms on this catalog page, such as MITSUBISHI Monitor Repair. See how powerful a site map can truly be.

SEO Tip #9: Include a robots.txt File

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type "User-agent: *". Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to "please feel free to crawl every page of my website".  Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding "Disallow: /folder_name/" or "Disallow: /filename.html".

SEO Tip #10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google

Though you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google's search engine result page, believe it or not that isn't Google's intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they've even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible.

SEO BONUS Tip: Validate Your Code

There are several ways to validate the accuracy of your website's source code. The four most important, in my opinion, are validating your search engine optimization, HTML, CSS and insuring that you have no broken links or images.