Web Design Blog
Popular Posts
- Fonts on the web and a list of web safe fonts
- CSS Hack:Getting Safari to behave
- Top 10 search engine optimization techniques
- Test IE5 or IE6 on your PC with IE7 installed
- CSS Trick: Target only IE with an if statement
- Top 10 job boards for freelance web designers
- Creating a photo gallery in CSS without tables
- CSS fix for the double margin float bug in IE6
- Open source Dreamweaver alternatives
- Popular fonts with their Mac OSX, Windows and Linux equivalents
Categories
Top 10 search engine optimization techniques
Posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 under SEO, blogging by Dustin Brewer.There are a lot of techniques that can be used in search engine optimization that can help or hurt you when it comes to SEO. Some of the big ones that can hurt is keyword stuffing and page cloaking. You want to always make sure that you are building a site for your visitors first and foremost. The robots aren’t quite as interested in your content as you think, sorry.
You can easily make your site search engine optimized by follow 10 easy steps that will make sure everything is ready for Google to go through and understand what your pages and site are about. This can help you to get more traffic from search engines by ranking well. Once you rank well, of course, you need to make sure that you are persuading the visitors to actually click on your search listing. The relevant and quality traffic is why we all have web sites and want to rank well in search engines, right?
The 10 Great SEO tips for your site
#1 Content
As cliché as it sounds this is the number one for any search marketing strategy, it is impossibly important to ensure that you have content worth viewing. Without this one simply step to ensure that there is a reason for someone to be on your site, everything else is useless. There are a lot of great sites to find inspiration for writing great content that works.
#2 Incoming Links
A link is a link is a link, but without the simplest form you aren’t going to do well in search engines. The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. It is also important to make sure that you have the proper anchor text for your incoming links. The easiest way to gain quality links from other sites is to link to sites to let them know your site is there and hope for a reciprocal link. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site.
#3 Web site title
Making sure that you have the right web site titles for your pages is extremely important. The keywords you place in your title are important in order to ensure that your topic is understood by Google. One of the primary factors for ranking is if the title is on-topic with the search results. Not only is it important for robots to index and understand the topic of the page either. It is important for click-through rates in the search results. Pay attention to what you click on when you are searching in Google, I know that I don’t always click the first results. Using great titles and topics on your site will bring you more traffic than a number one listing. Most of the time it is within the first page, but I skim through the titles to see which looks to be more on-topic for my search query.
#4 Heading tags
When you are laying out your site’s content you have to be sure that you are creating the content flow in such a way that the heading tags are based on prominence. The most prominent of course being the h1 tag, which says “this is what this block of copy is about.†Making sure you understand heading tag structure is very important. You only want to have one (or two) h1 tags per a page. It is important to not just throw anything into an h1 tag and hope you rank for it.
#5 Internal Linking
Making sure that your internal linking helps robots (and visitors!) to find the content on your site is huge. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell the robots (and visitors!) more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page. You do want to make sure that on pages you don’t want to rank in Google that you add a nofollow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your site’s topic and interests. No one is going to be searching Google to find out what your terms of service or privacy policy are.
#6 Keyword Density
Ensuring that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic is paramount. You don’t want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it “comes up†often is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more then 5% of the total copy per a page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you aren’t shooting for 5% every time. It is really all about context and relevance— just make sure it is good, quality copy.
#7 Sitemaps
It is always a good idea to give search engines a helping hand to find the content that is on your site. Making sure that you create and maintain a sitemap for all of the pages on your site will help the search robots to find all of the pages in your site and index them. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all support sitemaps and most of them offer a great way to ensure that it is finding your sitemap. Most of the time you can simply name it sitemap.xml and the search robot will find the file effectively.
#8 Meta Tags
Everyone will tell you that meta tags don’t matter, they do. The biggest thing they matter for is click-through though. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Definitely a much overlooked (as of late) ranking factor. Getting indexed by search engines and ranking well is just the first step. The next, and biggest, step is getting that visitor that searched for your keywords to want to click on your search listing.
#9 URL Structure
Ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important. There are various methods to make this work, such as modrewrite on apache.
#10 Domain
It can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the better it is not spam and can do well in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit.
What SEO tips help you the most with your site?
I’m sure there are some debates about the order I placed my list here, but all of these are definitely the best techniques to use. These aren’t in the order that you would do them necessarily but more in the order of importance for optimizing your site for search engines. What order would you put your list for best SEO techniques?
Subscribe to my RSS feed if you liked this post and would like to see more like it and if you really liked it, take some time and vote for it on Sphinn!
Whats Next?
74 Responses to “Top 10 search engine optimization techniques”
Leave a Reply
About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout the web design portfolio.
Great tips, already know the most of it but thanks!
[...] un titulo diferente Dustin Brewer un diseñador web freelance de Oklahoma, USA nos trae 10 consejos sobre cómo mejorar nuestra [...]
[...] Top 10 search engine optimization techniques: “Top 10 search engine optimization techniques” [...]
While I don’t have much to contribute to this entry, I have to agree that these techniques are important, no matter what order they’re listed in.
It also helps your SEO ranking to have links to your website on others’… for instance, commenting on their WordPress
Nice concise guide to the basics.
[...] 10 Simple SEO Tips [...]
[...] 10 Simple SEO Tips [...]
[...] los 10 mejores buscadores en internetnque conozco para poder saber sobre los 10 mejores buscadores en internet que conozco primero de centrarme en que son o que significan estos buscadores y para que sirben a saber: esto se obtuvo de la pag.VÃadustinbrewer.com [...]
I will add these:
1. Title Tags (which should be document titles or title elements, since it’s the text between the opening and closing title tags that is important, not the actual tags)
2. Keyword Density
3. Site Structure
4. Internal Links
5. Links and PageRank
6. Page Reputation
7. Anchor Text
Hey, I loved your article. Especially, the link part was the one that I loved. I will surely follow your advice. Thanks.
Hi
Realy Great tips for SEO. Thanks so much of SEO
Sundar
Effotechs.com
I’ve just read 2 articles from this blog and liking it so far.
I mostly keep in mind almost all of this “tips” when working with web-pages. But I didn’t know about the “Keyword Density”. Thanks a lot for the data, really appreciated.
I’ve been looking why 5% is the accorded limit but couldn’t find any info
[...] the rest of Top 10 search engine optimization techniques (1,059 [...]
Great content.. Thanks a lot..
Can you suggest any sites (Good Ones) that would allow linking my site/blog !
[...] 10 Simple SEO Tips [...]
Hi Dustin, Nice article for beginners looking to about search engine optimization. – Sudipta
Great tips for SEO, Thank You.
Thanks for this stuff! I will try to do some of this, if i have time. My website really needs help now.
That’s all good. I especially agree with ur last point, i think it should be higher up. Domain age is very important – i had a domain for 3 years and it was hosting a very basic website that wasnt updated in all this time but ranks first for “interesting places romania” query in google and 2nd or 3rd for “famous place romania”. Oh and if u want to get visitors to ur website before its indexed and makes its way to the top try social bookmariking. check my blog (click website link) to see my article on that. all the best to u all!
Hi,
Its really great tips for every search engine optimizer.
Hi,
Its reall nice tipe for seo and i love your article.
This is an excellent list of basic SEO tips. Thanks for the info!
Great tips. But I think good quality content is the most important part of SEO techniques as compared to rest of SEO techniques.
The style of writing is very familiar . Have you written guest posts for other blogs?
p.s. Year One is already on the Internet and you can watch it for free.