10 Simple SEO Tips

[Shadab]

Here are some very simple DIY (Do-It-Yourself) SEO Tips :

1. Create a sitemap

Build a sitemap, and search engines will follow. Even if it's just a plain list of links to all the individual unique pages of your website on a page named sitemap.html, it's good enough. Creating a sitemap according to sitemaps protocol and submitting it via the webmaster tools section of each of the popular search engine is even better.

2. Page Title should spark interest

Page Title and Meta Description gets displayed in the Search Engine results. Make it something interesting that people will want to click. Don't fill it up with keywords. Just make a quick message that entices the user to click. This way when you attain higher rankings, you'll get a better click-through rate !

3. Unique Title & Meta Tags

Make sure the meta description and title tag is unique for each and every page of your site, and describes the content of the page (not the site, overall). SEO is more effective when done on a per-page basis. Search Engines favor unique pages. To check if you have duplicate or short meta tags and page titles, Sign up with the Google Webmaster Tools, and add your site there.

4. Get High Authority Links

It can take a while for your site to be fully crawled and indexed. Apart from creating and submitting a complete sitemap, do some Link Building. Try to get links to your website from 'relevant' established / authority sites; and not just to the homepage, linking to deep pages is also beneficial. All this will help your site being indexed faster.

5. Stop Keyword Stuffing

Would have worked great 5 years ago. But Search Engines (especially Google) now are penalizing websites for stuffing the keywords. Keyword Stuffing is the excessive repetition of a keyword or keyphrase in order to increase it's density and attain higher rankings. Include your important relevant keywords in places like the Title tag, Meta Description, Headings (Hx) and the main content; but don't overdo it.

6. Avoid Duplicate Content

Typically, a site's homepage can be accessed from 4 different URLs.

www.yourdomain.tld , www.yourdomain.tld/index.php , yourdomain.tld , yourdomain.tld/index.php

That's exactly the same content on 4 different URLs. Also these 4 URLs may have 4 different PRs (PageRank Leak). To make your homepage accessible via only ONE URL... say... www.yourdomain.tld/ , use this code in your domain root's .htaccess file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.tld/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ / [R=301,L]

Also, If you have a subdomain that's in a publicly accessible folder of the parent domain, use a robots.txt file to prevent it from being indexed as a sub-folder. Or even better, use a .htaccess to redirect all requests to it as a folder, to the sub-domain. Any duplicate content on your website will end up hurting your rankings in the long run.

7. Use of Alt & Title Attributes

Use the image (img) tag's ALT attribute and anchor (a) tag's TITLE attribute to your advantage. Similar to the meta tags, don't stuff them with keywords. Use relevant keywords and keyphrases which best describe the image. Properly using the ALT attribute can help you rank better in the image search results (Google Image Search) too.

8. Say NO to JS / Flash navigation

Purely JavaScript and Flash based navigation systems look cool, but they are Search Engine UN-Friendly ! SEs can't read what you have included as links in javascript files and flash movies. So, if you really want to use JS / Flash menus, don't forget to include a text based version of the menu too; for search engines as well as those users who don't have JS / Flash enabled.

[ 5 Basic Rules of Website Development ]

9. Content Quantity

Pages with only a couple of sentences won't rank higher. SEs need 'content' to index. Web pages with more information tend to rank better in Search Engines; but only up to a point. It's best to keep the word count on your pages between 200 and 800 words. Build as much text as you can keeping it unique and tasteful.

10. Content Quality

As they say, Content is king. Fresh Content. Focus on getting unique, interesting and highly relevant content on your website. This is where most of your efforts should be put. Update your website with new content frequently (every month, if not every week). Don't delete your old non-performing pages ; tweak their content, Title & meta tags a little and you could rank well with those pages too.

About the Original Author : Jeremy Morgan is a SEO and Internet marketer who runs a SEO blog
Article Rewritten by : Shadab Ansari

[mkoenig]

Top 10 List always turn out good. Seen you over at jeremymorgan [dot] com before.

I think the 2 most important that people don't pay attention 2 are

5. Stop Keyword Stuffing
6. Avoid Duplicate Content

These 2 are hard for both novice and adept webmaster alike. Hard habits to kick.

[Grenland]

Great tips!

But number 6 - does that really hurt a ranking? Never thought of it that way.

[HealthPerson]

#8 is spot on and a lot of people don't realize how important it is to deliver content to the search engines. They make the cool but completely un-friendly flash design that has little seo value.

[kimsonsolutions]

helpfull list

i think of changing my title and meta descritipion for something unique now

[Stepho]

Great List.

I think another good tip would be to avoid dynamic content and keep images small enough, so that your page won't take to long to load, not only will your site not be indexed, but consider this, What do you do if you go to a site and it takes long to load? I just move on. (google is now able to index Flash)

It's no use having a good site with great content and no one sees it because it takes to long to load properly.
Remember to make your site user friendly, and crawl-able.

[Shadab]

Originally Posted by Grenland

Great tips!

But number 6 - does that really hurt a ranking? Never thought of it that way.

Haven't seen much cases of webmasters being penalized for that, myself.
But PR of those URLs would surely be different.

I experienced it right here in GeekPoint about 2 pagerank updates ago.

Though, search engines have become more intelligent over time; and Google now lets us choose which URL (with or without www) we want to appear in the search engine listings. (can be set via the Google Webmaster Tools).

[MakeMoneyOnline]

Very informative list

[jubach]

how about if i use the keyword for each post in a blog, does that affect the ranking?

[rajshree]

Useful information..