25+ SEO Tips For Getting Ranked Well In Search Engines
August 11, 2008 by: Arshad
Here are some SEO guides I go by when optimizing a website.
Keep in mind though you should always first make sure your website is designed well for human navigation and readability; SEO is secondary. Googlebot doesn’t buy from you, humans do.
When thinking about search engine optimization, I always design with the notion that search engine algorithms change over time. Therefore, even if something today doesn’t have a huge impact on SEO but it seems logically it might, I use it when possible. I try not to assume, but always plan.
Please note this article has a lot of links. Ironically, I didn’t do this for SEO but rather educational purposes.
SEO Tip 1 – Using keywords and phrases in your content
Search engines crawl your website’s content, links, and headers to look for keywords and phrases that match what a user typed in the search engine box. So if someone goes to Google and types “how do you catch butterflies” and you have an article with that exact phrase in your content (or even better, title or header), you stand a decent chance of getting indexed well for that search term.
They say Content is King. Web crawlers love to spider your content, so a large portion of your SEO will take place there. Keywords and Keyword Phrases are your best bet. Read more here and here.
SEO Tip 2: Sub-domains
A little less known SEO trick is the use of sub-domains. One of our forum users, ishkey, explained the use of sub-domains in his forum thread found here. Sub-domains use their own dns and are indexed differently than normal directories.
SEO Tip 3: Permalinks
Anyone who blogs knows what I’m talking about. A permalink makes your web address look pretty and understandable by humans. So for example, the following two links point to the same article on my blog:
- http://eventurebiz.com/blog/?p=118
- http://eventurebiz.com/blog/2-keys-to-beating-your-competition-in-business/
You see, the first link tells Googlebot ?p=118 is important to your article. The second link, however, tells Google 2-keys-to-beating-your-competition-in-business is important to your article. Which do you think someone is going to type in Google’s search box? “?p=118″ or “2 keys to beating your competition in business?”
Kyle over at Hack WordPress has a great article on the subject.
SEO Tip 4: Get A Google XML Sitemap
In my last post Is A Google XML Sitemap Necessary? I talked about how a xml Sitemap doesn’t necessarily affect your search engine rankings unless your site is not being indexed well. I think since it can’t hurt, go ahead and get one just in case a key page on your website is having problems getting indexed. Obviously, if the page isn’t getting indexed, it won’t show up in a search.
SEO Tip 5: Optimizing Your Web Page’s Title
This is probably one of the easiest things you can do which gives you a HUGE search engine ranking advantage, but so many people get it wrong. Each of your pages should have their own title and when possible, put a keyword or phrase in there.
Let’s look at the following two title examples I could use for the eVentureBiz About Us page.
- eVentureBiz – About Us
- About eVentureBiz – A Web 2.0 Hosting and Development Company For Businesses
The first example has no keywords while the second contains: web, hosting, development, company, businesses. Looking at the second one, I’m sure I can improve on it still.
Side Note: In my opinion, this is the fastest way to get a key web page from your site ranked well in search engines (i.e. matching up your page’s title to what people type into a search box).
SEO Tip 6: Include <meta> Tags
For the most part, Google pretty much ignores the famous <meta name=“keywords” tags. However, other search engines, such as Yahoo!, still reference these tags to help digest and index your website. So don’t forget to omit these. As proof that Yahoo! still references this tag, here’s a test run by Let’s Start Coding!
On another note, Google as a proven track record of tweaking their indexing algorithm. One day they may start referencing the keywords tag again in some new way to index and rank your website, so you might as well drop them in your code.
SEO Tip 7: Use the <alt> Attribute For Images
When you use images on your site, be sure to include the <alt> tag. Many times, people do an image search in search engines and these tags will all of a sudden become important parts of your website’s code.
Plus, Web crawlers can’t crawl images, but they can crawl your <alt> tags.
Once again, I’d like to stress the importance of designing for humans and not search engines. For example, people who are blind typically have Web browsers speak content to them and for images, will read the alt text. Just describe the meaning of your image and that usually will have a SEO impact.
SEO Tip 8: Check Your Template’s Uses Of The <h> Tags
This is a little trick I figured out a while back that not many people know about. The header tags (<h1>, <h2>, and <h3>) are important to Web crawlers. What you put between them ranks higher in importance than normal content – hey this reminds me of only reading the bold print back in my college days.
If you run a script on your Web server, such as a blog, forum, or image gallery, it’s likely that your h tags are being misused by your default template. Let’s look at an example.
Near the top left corner of my blog you’ll see a heading in my sidebar called “About This Blog.” Looking at my blog’s code, you will find *About This Blog* is nested between two h2 tags as follows:
<h2 class=”widgettitle”>about this blog</h2>
So what my blog is telling Googlebot is the term about this blog is an important term to be noted. Is it though?
Nope.
Words like entrepreneur or web development should be my <h> terms. So why haven’t I changed this yet? Because I’m saving those changes for a post I’ve got in the works which is about speeding up and customizing your WordPress template once it has found a home on your site.
SEO Tip 9: Flash Sites Look Nice, Index Poorly
Flash sites can be fun, but you gotta be careful when designing an entire site in flash because spiders currently have issues when crawling and understanding flash sites and menus.
SEO Tip 10: Avoid Duplicate Content
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