10 SEO Tips

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation can be costly both in terms of time and money. Before you start you need a plan or what you need to do, here are 10 tips to get you on your way..

The best SEO strategies involve following white hat SEO techniques and staying away from activities that could adversely affect your search engine rankings or worse, that can get your website banned by Google et al. Do you need to improve your search engine rankings? If so (and who doesn't) here are 10 SEO tips to get you to the top.

SEO Tips - 10 Do's Of SEO

1) Thoroughly research potential keywords. The main purpose of organic SEO is to get increase relevant and targetted traffic for all the right keywords. As SEO can take lots of effort, and sometimes money, you should have a clear idea right from the start as to what keywords you want to target. There are many services available, such as WordTracker and Google AdWords Keyword Tool but I recommend you use your own discretion. These tool will enable you to find the most popular pages and just as importantly the pages with the least competition.

2) Target long tail keywords. These keywords have lower volumes of traffic, but in total add up to a sizeable amount of business. By their very nature they will also have low levels of completion making it easier and quicker for you to achieve higher search engine rankings and get your SEO campaign of to a good start.

3) Relevant content. Relevant content makes your website information-rich; increases your keyword density; it makes you web site far more likely to receive high quality inbound links. Updating your website with new relevant content should form part of any good long term SEO strategy.

4) Unique titles for every page. Titles are used by the search engines to both rank and display pages. Leveraging your page titles will increase your rankings and search engine traffic.

5) Unique description for each page. Your description meta tag should describe your page in one or two sentences, and of course include your keywords. Like the title your description also appears on the search engine results pages and as searchers often click links after reading the description your page description should obviously be as compelling as possible.

6) Keep the important content near the top. Content at the top of the page is considered more important than the content below, so ensure your keywords are near the top.

7) Use semantic HTML where possible. Ensure you use semantic HTML and that your keywords appear within the heading tags H1 through to H8, although personally I rarely get to H8.).

8) Use search engine friendly URLs. Try not to use dynamically generated URLs, instead use search engine friendly URLs .

9) Create a sitemap and keep it up to date. A sitemap should be a separate web page containing links to all your web pages you want indexed by the search engine crawlers.

10) Online directories. Having entries in directories likeYahoo, BOTW and DMOZ! (it's the original directory) can enhance your search engine rankings if your link gets included in them.


------

The full article is made available for download by Doublespark SEO Consultants.

Gary Mattoc of Web Design Peterborough