7 SEO Tips

In our ever lasting quest to dominate the search engines we are still willing to learn the in & outs of what we like to call search engine optimization.

Below we have a few tip - 7 to be exact- that could be crucial to get you moving towards the end destination which is ofcourse, page 1 ranking for your keyword on google (and yahoo etc).

1) The Title Tag- When were talking about SEO Technique, the Title tag is one of the best and most powerful tags that you can use.

Every page should have its own title tag, each tag should include the keyword that you are targeting, along with sub-keywords associated with the main keyword that you seek to drive traffic from. Not only does this have SEO benefits but also makes yoru website look professional and coherent. Users will be able to identify where they are immediately giving you some sort of authority. Imagine having “index.php” as the title tag?

2) ALT Tags- These tags are most often ignored completely. Who would have thought that tags, that were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn’t show in text browsers, would become part of a technique to raise the keyword density of a webpage.

Your main keywords need to be included in some ALT tags- be careful, over-doing this could cause you to be banned and your PR could drop. Furthermore, the ALT tags in images help to show users which may be blind to understand what they where supposed to see if they are using any reader programs. Infact, should the picture not show up the ALT tag will explaining to the viewer what was meant to be here, i.e a short definition.

3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool, (arguably, of course). Typically a website must have a link to it, in order to be looked at by the spiders. This means that you should have at least 1-2 links going into your site from another website that has been visited by the spiders through search engines. Increasing Page Rank, depends on the number and quality of the sites that link into yours.

Keywords should be in the links, along with sub-keywords. Keep the links short; this creates an easily readable keyword term for the search engines to recognize.

Take SweetHacks for example, we rank quite high for a lot of keywords such as “tech blog” (subject to change) and as a result receive decent traffic from search engines. Furthermore, we are currently a PR5 due to the man inbound links we have from many other blogs so therefore link building should be an essential part to anyones online venture.

4) Keyword Density Research - You should research keywords first then decide on the keywords that you want to target. Dont over do it- you should use the keywords only once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and then shoot for the density to be between 5% to 20% .

Keywords should also be strategically located throughout your website. Place them in all locations. Several search engines will recognize bottom of the page or sidebar text/links and discount them, this is because many website designers will load certain sections with clutter.

5) Page Size - Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size. I just designed one that is close to 53k, this is mostly because of pictures and a flash file being used, rule of thumb. Look at Yahoo! And Google, These are some of the fastest loading pages, and most popular, people dont like to wait even if you have cool graphics and pictures.

Your web page’s speed is important: robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. However, websites genereally now a days tend to be much larger with the popularity of images and video sites on the increase. Perhaps in the near future the spiders/robots would be configured by search engines to spend more time on a website in order to index more thoroughly.

6) Theme Rich in content - Search engines are looking at themes rather than just the words or pictures. Content is King I know, you hear it a lot, but its true! Webpages should have content that’s related to the targeted market. Link your visitors to other valuable and related content within your own site.

The more pages the better. A good tool that I have found to show you linking info is: http://www.UpTimeBot.com You can preload upto 20 pages and then refersh them, it shows all the vital information, along with how many pages are indexed from each search engine. The more pages you have indexed, the more traffic you will receives, its simple.

7) Cross Linking - within your Own Site You rely on other pages linking into yours in order to get indexed; the same is true for all the pages within your site. Any new content should be easily reachable through 1-3 pages of content. Linking back to your main home page, or a storefront will help you get indexed faster and achieve a higher Page Rank.

What I have found to also work is to link to already high PR, authority figure websites online. This has had nothing but a good effect on my pages as they have received a high PR.

Example? http://www.sweethacks.com/recommended/micfo.php - PR6, yes its higher than our homepage! Whats funny is this page used to be a redirect to Micfo webhost (which is currently a PR6). I can not really explain why but it is widely believe that linking to the right websites i.e high PR sites should positively affect your serps or PR.

8 ) Spam meta tag (keywords) - Joke! Seriously, do not do it! This will do absolutely nothing for you and may just result in you getting de-indexed from search engines. You may find this is recommended in certain ebooks but thats old/classic SEO those days are far over. However you should have a few and a good place is in the header:

So I hope these 8 7 tips will help you on your quest to dominate google! Good Luck.

Thanks go to Scott Fish for originally writing this article which we edited and republished (with permission ofcourse).