Top SEO Tips

Smaller businessmen and webmasters are growing more and more aware that it is crucial to implement at least fundamental principles of search engine optimization in order to be successful on the Web. Most of the time they feel so sure of their skills and knowledge that they won’t even consult their SEO strategy with SEO experts and professionals that have been active in the industry for years. As a result, I see numerous websites striving for proper search engine optimization without a neccessary SEO knowledge. These efforts fail due to misunderstood or incorrectly adopted SEO tactics and strategies.

I have written down a list of various SEO tips. They are aimed especially at small business owners and starting webmasters but I hope that even those more experienced will find few useful tips here, too.

I will be keeping this list updated and possibly adding more tips in the future.

Top SEO Tips List

1. Build a great website. So you want to get to the top page, huh? That’s a nice goal but keep in mind that just any website won’t get there. Look at your site and be honest: do you really think it can compare with rival sites that rank good in search engines? If the answer is no, you know what to do. Sometimes it won’t be enough to edit few minor issues, you might need to completely rebuild the website from scratch. You must be very hardworking and consistent in order to make a great website.

2. Users first. Search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN all use powerful bots to crawl the Web but the bots won’t read your content, post at your forum, comment at your blog, sign up for a newsleter, buy a product or send you an email regarding services you offer. Humans do that. So keep this in your mind when building your site. Keep it readable and easy to navigate. Sure, keywords are important for search engines but stuffing each page with them is not the brightest idea. It will make your site look unprofessional and discourage potential readers and customers/clients.

3. Content is king. This is the golden SEO rule. Bringing people to your site is one thing but keeping them or giving them an incentive to come back in the future is often much more difficult task. When writing the content, be very careful. Try to make it unique and full of information but don’t overdo it. Keep it interesting and easy to read so the visitors will come back in the future to check for updates.

4. Set your goals. Do keyword research and analysis first. Before you start working on SEO and the website promotion, you should have a clear idea about what you want to achieve. Once you know your goals, you should do a comprehensive keyword research and analysis in order to seek out the keywords that might work good for you (see Choosing The Right Keywords).

5. Make SEO friendly URLs. Extremely important one. Mainly with dynamic websites using some CMS (i.e. Content Management System). For example, default WordPress permalinks are absolutely dreadful for SEO. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to change them (read Lighttpd And WordPress SEO Friendly Permalinks for step by step guide).

6. Use unique and relevant title and h1 tags on each page. They are the most important semantic elements and are crucial for on page SEO. Each page should have its own unique and relevant title and h1 heading tag.

7. Use unique and relevant meta tags on each page. Especially two of them may have a little impact on SEO – description and keywords meta tags. Each page should have its own description and keywords. Description shouldn’t be longer than 160 characters (most search engines limit the length of search result descriptions).

8. Use your keywords as anchor texts while linking pages together. Your home page is the most important but do not forget about other pages. While linking them together, use keywords as anchor texts. That will improve your search engine visibility. On the other hand, links saying just “click here” won’t help at all and should be avoided.

9. Make a sitemap. Spiders index only pages they can find. A sitemap will help spiders find all important pages and better understand the hierarchy of your website. This is essential mainly when your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu. There are two types of sitemaps you should consider. Firstly, you can simply include a sitemap page in your website (or several sitemap pages in case the website is too robust and have too many pages). Secondly, you can create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines that support it.

10. Make a robots.txt file. Web robots (also known a Spiders, Crawlers or Web Wanderers) are programs that travel the Web. Search engines use them to index pages. A robots.txt file (also called The Robots Exclusion Protocol) gives instructions to robots. It tells spiders which pages they should and which they should not crawl. For detailed documentation see Robots Exclusion Standard page at Wikipedia.

11. Build quality backlinks. This one is a matter of course. Backlinks are the most important factor that determines your search engine ranking. Note that quality matters more than quantity here. It is better to have fewer high quality and relevant backlinks than thousands of backlins from low quality or spammy websites. Submit your site to trusted directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva, Best of the Web, Librarians’ Internet Index and few others. Get in touch with owners of similar relevant websites and try to negotiate a link exchange. Go for links from trusted authority sites in your industry. Analyze competitors to find out links you could acquire, too.

12. Take an advantage of social media marketing. The first rule here is Don’t spam! – be an active and contribute member of society. Join Flickr and contribute with quality photos from your industry. Help other people at Yahoo Answers and be respected and viewed as an expert in your field. You can also check out social bookmarking websites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Mixx and others.

13. Take an advantage of press releases. Media covering your industry or local region can become a huge source of exposure plus you might get some quality backlinks from trusted media websites. Online press releases have a potential to be an effective link building strategy.

14. Learn from competitors. This is one of the advices I often recommend. Type your primary keyword in search engines and examine the top ranking websites. Study their keywords, site structure, inbound links – there are reasons why they are sitting at the top of search engines.

15. Hire an experienced professional. SEO isn’t a rocket science. Though, it is difficult to fully understand its concepts and learn how to properly implement individual techniques in a short period of time. It often takes months or even years to become an expert. Consult your SEO strategy with professionals that have been active in the industry for a long time. Their experience will help you perfect your SEO plan. They might also point you to the right direction in areas you are not so certain about as well as warn you against frequently made mistakes.

16. Be patient. SEO takes time. Sometimes a lot of time. This is especially true for smaller or new sites. Don’t worry about that. Just continue to add new content and improve your website. Results will come.

17. Be flexible. SEO isn’t a one time job. It is a constant process that sometimes requires changes on the run. Be ready to adapt your strategy to changes in a search engine world.

18. Use tools the search engine give you. Sign up for Google’s Webmaster Central and Yahoo’s Site Explorer to manage your site and track its performance in search engines.

19. Diversify your traffic sources. Google might bring 80% of your traffic today but it may bring next to no traffic tomorrow because of an algorhitm change. Be careful and don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Try to get a strong position in other major search engines as well. Offer email subscription or newsletters to your visitors. This will help you build a loyal community that will continue to come back even though your site’s visibility in search engines will have gone away.

20. Start a blog and cooperate with other niche related blogs. Search engines like blogs for the fresh content and well structured data. In addition, it is a great way to join discussions that are already taking place about your industry or website. Keeping close relationships with relevant blogs and commenting on them may also increase your exposure and help you acquire new backlinks.

21. Hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_). Use hyphens to separate words in file and folder names. Most search engines parse hyphens as spaces (unlike underscores which are ignored). For example, Toshiba_laptop will be parsed as Toshibalaptop. On the other hand, Toshiba-laptop will be parsed as Toshiba laptop – which is clearly much better.

22. Always include alt attribute into img elements. Alt attribute defines a short description of the image. The main purpose is to specify a textual replacement for the image but it also helps your website rank better in Google Image Search and might bring some additional traffic, too.

23. Standards compliance. Even though many people would disagree, I believe that web standards are important for SEO. Because of the structural information present in standards compliant content, it gets indexed more accurately. On top of that, validation errors may confuse search engine spiders.