Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips
Optimizing your site for search engines to see is a very important step to consider while you are designing your website. The content of your webpage is equally important!
Listed below are a few helpful tips to optimize your website.
Design/Set Up Problems
There are some site designs that make it very difficult for search engines to spider through a website regardless of how well your content is written or how clean your code is. The most common problems are:
- Frames.
- Dynamic URL's.
- Flash.
- Image Maps for navigation.
- Javascript for navigation.
These things listed may improve site design, and may even make the site look nicer, but it can be a real disaster trying to get search engines to see your site, regardless of how well your site is optimized.
Page text tips
The best thing for your website is content. Search engines really like to see it on your website. Sometimes is very difficult to attain enough content text for each page, however it is recommended that you have at least 200 words of text on each page.
The text should include your most important keyword phrases, but should remain logical & readable.
Add copy filled pages to your site. How-to articles, tips or tutorials are all great additions. These pages help creating more pages for the search engine to see, and so long as the content is usable and accurate, other sites will link to your page.
Keywords
Your keywords are your bread and butter. Selecting the right keywords for your website is an absolutely crucial part of your site design. Your keywords are not only included in the META tag section of your website (which only search engines see), but the most important keywords should also be included inside all of your copy text.
Selecting the right keywords can be difficult, and choosing them is a process. Taking the time to select the right keywords requires some research. For business you would ideally want to see what keywords your competitors are using or not using for that matter.
Optimizing Your Title Tag
Optimizing yoru title tag in your website, is something very simple to do. When optimizing your title tag, keep the following few tips in mind.
- Title tags should be 50 - 80 characters long, including spaces.
- Make your title interesting and enticing. The title of the page is one of the first things visitors see in the Search Engine. Much like the title of a book, the title of a webpage can mean the difference between someone visiting your site or looking at the next listing!
Optimize Text Hyperlinks
Text links to other pages on the internet can help you increase your website ranking on a search engine. For that reason, having a few different links on each page, improves your ranking on the search engines.
When a search engine sees a link on your website, it assumes that the link you present has relevant content to the site that you are hosting. This in turn creates a link for your site as well as the site you are linking too, thus improving your rating when they search either your site or the other site to which you link to.
Using YouTube, phpBB, and Wordpress (or other blog pages)
One of the easiest things you can do to create some nice links to your page is to use phpBB, Wordpress, and Youtube to your advantage. Using Social Networking Sites can greatly increase your rankings.
Online Stores
Online stores that don't use a service such as Network Solutions or Yahoo! Small Business, need to be optimized as well. OSCommerce, and ZenCart are two great ways to upload content to a website and optimize very easily. The biggest issue with these is dynamic URLs, and content into the meta tags. They are easy to optimize so long as you know your keywords and have good descriptive text about your products.
Things Not To Do
- Keyword Spamming. Listing Keywords is something that will cause Search Engines to drop your site from their index. There are very few reasons you would actually need to do this. Unless it is necessary, this is a practice that should not be used
- Hiding text, heading tags, or keywords by creating them as the same text as the background of the site. You see this a lot in Craigslist posts, this is really looked down upon by seach engines.
- Keyword Stuffing is a very bad practice. Packing 100, or 200 key words into a meta tag is a bad idea, and will definitely get you booted from a seach engine.
