Top 10 tips on SEO for your website

#1  Content

As cliché as it sounds this is the number one for any search marketing strategy, it is so important to ensure that you have quality content that is relevant and worth viewing. This is so simple but so crucial, giving a person a reason to visit your site is the keystone to great SEO. There are a lot of great sites with tips on finding inspiration for writing content that works.

#2 Incoming Links

The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. The easier it is for a person to find you the easier it is for search engines to crawl your website content. Linking to other sites with good content through anchor text will help both you and the site you link to. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site. Another great way to build links is posting your url on credible social media sites. Search engines already trust most of the big social media sites so posting your website url on your profile will really help with getting crawled and make it easier for people to find your site.

#3 Web site title

Making sure that you have effective 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. It is important for robots to index and understand the topic of each page on your site. It is also 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.

#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 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 that are your main keywords.

#5 Internal Linking

Internal linking helps search engine robots (and visitors!) find the content on your site. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell visitors more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page.

#6 Keyword Density

Ensure that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic. You don’t want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it appears consistently is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more than 5% of the total copy per page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you aren’t shooting for 5% every time. What is key is context and relevance.

#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. They aid your click-through rate and help images on your website appear in search engines. 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 Update

Regularly update SEO friendly content to your pages often to keep things fresh and relevant.

#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 more likely it is not spam and the better it does in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help.

FREE TIP!

It can sometimes take Google a month or more to crawl your site so if it is not appearing on search engines that could be why.