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
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.
BEWARE: Putting ridiculous amounts
of keywords on your site will get you labeled as a spammer, and search engine
spiders are programmed to ignore sites guilty of "keyword-stuffing."
Be strategic in your keyword use.
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."
As with all other SEO approaches, be
sure your links are appropriate, and be careful not to cross the line into
excessive linking -- you don't want your visitors to get annoyed.
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.
"The fewer clicks necessary to
get to a page on your website, the better," advises MarketingVox.
Search-friendly URLs
Make your URLs more
search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords.
SEO Consult explains: "For instance, it’s
easy to understand what ‘www.puppyfun.co.uk/puppyhealth/vitamins’ would
contain. It’s less easy to understand if the in-house classification system of
the business is used, for example ‘www.puppyfun.co.uk/11789/s201.htm’. A dynamic
URL is similarly off-putting, even if it contains recognisable words: ‘www.puppyfun.co.uk/search/?s=”health”’.
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."
"If you absolutely MUST have
your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text
and navigation links below the fold," the post continues.
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.
The visible text around your images
is valuable for SEO: MarketPosition suggests adding captions to all
your pictures and being descriptive with the text in immediate physical
proximity to your images.
Content
Your content needs to be fresh --
updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic.
"The best sites for users, and
consequently for search engines, are full of oft-updated, useful information
about a given service, product, topic or discipline," MarketingVox explains.
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!
Make certain that your partner has a
good web-reputation, of course. MarketingVox warns against getting tied to a
"link farm" whose bad SEO habits could bring you down.
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-basic-seo-tips-everyone-should-know-2010-1?op=1
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