Top 10 search engine optimization techniques
January 29th, 2008 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?
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January 29th, 2008
Hey thanks for the link, I really appreciate it!
GREAT article - keep them coming!
January 30th, 2008
Great tips and links, time to put them to work :)
January 30th, 2008
Great article, nice white hat seo list. It is good to see an article that helps you build your website for search engines and visitors rather than build your web site just for the robots and try to trick visitors into coming to the site.
January 30th, 2008
@Ryan, Mike: Thanks, I’m glad you liked it.
@Jill: I try to keep any recommendations that I make on this site as white hat as possible. I do the same in practice, most of the time.
January 30th, 2008
Simple and to the point. Thanks Dustin
January 31st, 2008
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January 31st, 2008
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January 31st, 2008
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January 31st, 2008
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January 31st, 2008
Excellent article Dustin. Ideal for website owners who are new to SEO and are looking to understand the basics.
I’ll definitely be passing this on to my customers.
January 31st, 2008
[…] Brewer ha escrito un pequeño artículo con una lista de 10 técnicas de optimización para buscadores y me parece que lo ha hecho muy […]
February 1st, 2008
Really nice overwiew of the 10 most important facts to remember when setting u a website. Looking forward to read more articles like this!
February 1st, 2008
Very comprehensive — a great intro resource. I would also consider image alt tagging as Top-10 worthy…
February 1st, 2008
And what about robots.txt and no-follow? Especially for blogs this is important to prefent duplicate content. It can also help to give some pages no-index to give other pages more weight.
February 1st, 2008
Great post! I’m going to share this with the rest of my team!
February 1st, 2008
Jan-Willem, Rob, Andrew, Zac: Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed the article and found use out of the tips
Reynder: I think that those tips are more advanced and I will probably write a top 10 advanced techniques for seo article next week. So keep a look out for those tips, hopefully I can choose 10 that will be effective— and white hat.
February 1st, 2008
great top 10… I love top 10 of anything.
February 1st, 2008
Excellent way to share the very fundamentals of high-integrity web design, Dustin.
If more folks would follow this pattern in their development, I suspect three things would happen:
1) They would get better overall online success
2) The SEs would spend more time indexing, less fighting spammish web sites, and…
3) We could cut our surfing down by 40%. Rather than digging fruitlessly through splogs for the real story, we would actually find awesome content.
So… what’s next?
Keep us posted, and thanks a ton for a great contribution.
Warm regards,
Mark Alan Effinger http://www.RichContent.com
February 2nd, 2008
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February 3rd, 2008
[…] Top 10 search engine optimization techniques | web design news and style 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 (tags: seo) […]
February 4th, 2008
[…] Top 10 search engine optimization techniques […]
February 5th, 2008
[…] Top 10 SEO Techniques from Dustin Brewer. […]
February 5th, 2008
[…] Top 10 search engine optimization techniques […]
February 10th, 2008
Great tips!!!
Beast regards
February 15th, 2008
Interested in talking to you about the Seminars we teach. Having trouble getting on Google with AdWords, etc.
February 16th, 2008
[…] Top 10 SEO Techniques from Dustin Brewer. […]
February 25th, 2008
[…] Top 10 search engine optimization techniques […]
February 26th, 2008
nice one Dustin!
Keep it up!
- Wakish -
March 4th, 2008
Fantastic article. Keep up the good work!
March 12th, 2008
The article is great. Appreciate that you’ve posted techniques for search engine optimization. This things would help me and others that are into SEO stuff. Hope you’ll continue posting articles that is helpful. Nice job!
March 12th, 2008
Great Tips Really
Thanks For that
Sachin Gupta
http://www.sntinfotech.com
Website Designing Company
March 16th, 2008
[…] Link: http://dustinbrewer.com/top-10-search-engine-optimization-techniques/ […]
April 8th, 2008
[…] 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? Top 10 search engine optimization techniques | web design news and style […]
April 13th, 2008
nice read. this’ll help those in need of more website optimization =P
April 25th, 2008
[…] Autor: Dustin Brewer […]
April 30th, 2008
[…] Autor: Dustin Brewer […]
May 5th, 2008
That’s very ultimate… do you know i am very much fond of to read these sorts of articles & please to say that i like your article. you’re so different. keep peer on this work process & this’ll help us for website optimization services.
May 9th, 2008
[…] The 10 Great SEO tips for your site: Dustin has an article where he talks about how to make your site search engine optimized by 10 easy steps. […]
May 13th, 2008
Great article with lots of information……
May 13th, 2008
It was really a good article in very few words.
Quite easy to understand what exactly wants to say.
Best Regards prasad
May 22nd, 2008
[…] Créditos: Dustin Brewer […]
June 18th, 2008
[…] Top 10 search engine optimization techniques Tags: posicionamiento, Seo, Tecnicas SEO, Trucos, Tutoriales Artículos […]
June 25th, 2008
Great information, I agree with everything that you talk about to what increases all the SEO efforts and also what it takes to get a site ranked high.
June 28th, 2008
It’s great to see that everyone is getting a better understand of what it takes to get ranked on search engines. However I have been searching the internet for months trying to find new techniques to use to get my site ranked higher. My website has all 10 features you listed above down PAT and I’m ranking well for my keywords on 2nd and 3rd pages but it seems that all my competition that is on page 1 have been around a lot longer then I have. Is this why they are higher then me?
June 29th, 2008
@James A lot of it can be related to the quality of links you have coming into your site and to the age of your site if it is younger than 6 months.
Most of the time as long as you are doing everything else perfectly, after 6 months your site should be able to easily compete with older domains. Link building is the primary method to which you are going to be able to build search traffic (as well as other traffic). Be sure to get creative with the anchor text you are using for people linking into your site.
July 3rd, 2008
Nice post, great to learn some seo skills.Thanks for sharing you ideas.
July 17th, 2008
[…] Top 10 search engine optimization techniques […]
July 19th, 2008
i lyk this site so much… i appreciate the isotonic idea of the owner who made this…
July 24th, 2008
[…] 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 arent 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 clich 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 arent 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 dont 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 sites 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 dont want to rank in Google that you add a nofollow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your sites 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 dont 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 arent 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 dont 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 isnt a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit. Top 10 search engine optimizationtechniques […]