It is not hard to be barking up the wrong tree
when it comes to getting search engine traffic because there is so much
out of date information being circulated.
Not only is there out of date or invalid Search Engine Optimization
advice getting around, there is also information which if acted upon,
can result in your pages being banned.
The SEO tips below should assist the reader in
forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages
which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.
Know this. There are thousands of search engines
but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are
google and yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic
is msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.
Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.
Basic SEO
1. Insert keywords within the title tag so
that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title
tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.
Make sure that the title tag contains text which
a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up
in a search result. Treat it like a headline.
2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to
link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially
useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to
a specific page the better.
3. Make sure that the text within the
title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have
keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of
the page.
Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will
tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result
that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page
where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is
a relation between the title of your page and the headline.
Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your
article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A
good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your
article and in the sub-headings.
4. Do not use the exact same title tag on
every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that
all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If
this happens, your pages might not get indexed.
I always use the headline of my pages as the
title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good
place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is
the same as the title tag text.
5. Do not spam the description or keyword
meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time
on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important
today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the
keywords and description tags.
6. Do not link to link-farms or other
search engine unfriendly neighborhoods. A good rule of thumb is if your
pages do not contain any words that reflect the content of the site you
are linking to, do not link to it.
7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages
are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index
human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the
search.
8. Title tags for text links. Insert the
title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link
and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for
images.
My site contains navigation menus on the left and
right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. The links are
keywords. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of
the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this
tag to your links.
9. Describe your images with the use of
the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find
your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.
10. Submit to the search engines yourself.
Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could
get your site penalized or even banned.
Here is the submission page for google:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Submit only once. There is no need to submit
every two weeks. There is no need to submit more that one page. Robots
follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will
get indexed.
If you follow these simple steps, in due time you should see your website rank high in within the search engines.
Hi Natalie, I currently work full time and I do a lot of freelance work on the side, although I'm... read more
on Google Search Engine Optimization