Ten SEO Tips for any Website
Achieving a high ranking in the search results at Google and other search sites is, for many websites, the primary means of attracting new visitors and increasing traffic. That's why it's important to optimize your site for search, using various search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. The better optimized your site, the higher it will appear in the search rankings—and the more traffic you'll attract.With that in mind, here are 10 SEO tips that you can use with any website, no matter what the site's content. Follow the advice here and you'll likely improve your ranking!
TIP #1: Improve Your Content
Ultimately, people visit a given website because it has valuable content. If the content isn't any good, all the SEO in the world won't create new visitors.
That's why of all the SEO tips in the world, the one that has the biggest impact is improving your website's content. It's simple: The better your site is, content-wise, the higher it will rank.
You see, when it comes to search rank, content is king. Ultimately, the better search engines find some way to figure out what your site is all about; the higher quality and more relevant your site's content is to a particular search, the more likely it is that a search engine will rank your site higher in its results.
So forget all about fancy keywords and technical META tags for the time being, and focus on what it is your site does and says.
If your site is about NASCAR racing, work to make it the most content-rich site about NASCAR you can; if it's about aquariums, make it the highest-quality aquarium site possible. Don't skimp on the content—the more and more relevant content you have, the better.
Here's what you need to remember: SEO isn't about technological tricks. It's about making your site more useful to visitors—and that means providing the best possible content you can. Everything else follows from this.
TIP #2: Create a Clear Organization and Hierarchy
Here's an important fact: Web crawlers for the major search sites can find more content on a web page and more web pages on a website if that content and those pages are in a clear hierarchical organization.
Let's look at page organization first. You want to think of each web page as a mini-outline. The most important information should be in major headings, with lesser information in subheadings beneath the major headings.
One way to do this is via standard HTML heading tags, with the most important information in H1 tags, the next most-important in H2 tags, and less-important information in H3 tags.
This approach is also appropriate for your entire site layout. Your home page should contain the most important information, with subsidiary pages branching out from that containing less important information—and even more subpages branching out from those. The most important info should be visible when a site is first accessed via the home page; additional info should be no more than a click or two away.
TIP #3: Fine-Tune Your Keywords
Just as important as a page's layout is the page's content in terms of keywords. A keyword is a word or phrase that the user searches for.
In determining search ranking, the major search engines look to determine how important a keyword or phrase is on your page. They do this by seeing where on the page the keyword is used and how many times it's used. A site with a keyword buried near the bottom of a page will rank lower than one with the keyword placed near the top or used repeatedly in the page's text. It's not a foolproof way of determining importance and appropriateness, but it's a good first stab at it.
When various search engines examine your page, they look for the most important words—those words used in the site's title or headings, those words that appear in the opening paragraph, and those words that are repeated throughout the page. The more and more prominently you include a word on your page, the more important a search engine will think it is to your site.
For this reason, you want to make sure that each and every page on your site contains the keywords that users might use to search for your pages. If your site is all about drums, make sure your pages include words like "drums," "percussion," "sticks," "heads," "cymbals," "snare," and the like. If your site is about dogs, include words like "dog," "puppy," "canine," "beagle," "collie," "dachshund," and such.
Try to think through how you would search for this information, and work those keywords into your content.
TIP #4: Tweak Your META Tags
A search engine looks not just to the text that visitors see when trying to determine the content of your site. Also important is the presence of keywords in your site's HTML code—specifically within the META tag.
The META tag includes metadata about your site, such as your site's name and keyword "content." This tag appears in the head of your HTML document, before the BODY tag and its contents.
It's easy enough for a search engine to locate the META tag and read the data contained within. If a site's metadata is properly indicated, this gives the search engine a good first idea about what content is included on this page.
Fortunately, you can insert multiple META tags into the head of your document, and each tag can contain a number of different attributes. For example, you can assign attributes for your page's name, a description, and keywords to the META tag.
You use separate META tags to define different attributes using the following format:
META NAME="attribute" CONTENT="items"NOTE
In the previous line of code, replace attribute with the name of the particular attribute, and items with the keywords or description of that attribute.
For example, to include a description of your web page, enter this line of code:
META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="All about stamp collecting"
To include a list of keywords, use the following code:
META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"
TIP #5: Solicit Inbound Links
Google got to be Google by recognizing that web rankings could be somewhat of a popularity contest; that is, if a site got a lot of traffic, there was probably a good reason why. A useless site wouldn't attract a lot of visitors (at least not long term), nor would it inspire other sites to link to it.
So if a site has a lot of other sites linking back to it, it's probably because that site offers useful information relevant to the site doing the linking. The more links to a given site, the more useful it probably is.
Google took this to heart and developed its own algorithm, dubbed PageRank, which is based first and foremost on the number and quality of sites that link to a particular page.
If your site has a hundred sites linking to it, for example, it should rank higher in Google's search results than a similar site with only ten sites linking to it. Yes, it's a popularity contest, but one that has proven uncannily accurate in providing relevant results to Google's users.
And it's not just the quantity of links; it's also the quality. That is, a site that includes content that is relative to your page is more important than just some random site that links to your page. For example, if you have a site about NASCAR racing, you'll get more oomph with a link from another NASCAR-related site than you would with a link from a site about Barbie dolls. Relevance matters.
So when it comes to increasing your rankings at Google (which is, far and away, the largest and most important search engine), you can get a big impact by getting more higher-quality sites to link back to your site.
There are a number of ways to do this: from just waiting for the links to roll in to actively soliciting links from other sites. You can even pay other sites to link back to your site; when it comes to increasing your site's search ranking, little is out of bounds. But however you do, increasing the number and quality of inbound links is essential.
TIP #6: Submit Your Site
While you could wait for the each search engine's crawler to find your site on the Web, a more proactive approach is to manually submit your site for inclusion in each engine's web index. It's an easy process—and one that every webmaster should master.
Fortunately, submitting your site to a search engine is an easy process. In fact, it's probably the easiest part of the SEO process. All you have to do is go the submission page for each search engine, as noted here:
•Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
•Yahoo!: siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit/
•Windows Live Search: search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
As easy as this site submittal process is, some webmasters prefer to offload the task to a site submittal service. These services let you enter your URL once and then submit it to multiple search engines and directories; they handle all the details required by each search engine. Given that many of these services are free, it's not a bad way to go.
TIP #7: Create a Sitemap
Here's something else that you can submit to increase your site's ranking: a sitemap. A sitemap is a map of all the URLs in your entire website, listed in hierarchical order. Search engines can use this sitemap to determine what's where on your site, find otherwise-hidden URLs on deeply buried pages, and speed up their indexing process. In addition, whenever you update the pages on your website, submitting an updated sitemap helps keep the search engines up-to-date.
The big three search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search), along with Ask.com, all support a single sitemap standard. This means you can create just one sitemap that all the search engines can use; you don't have to worry about different formats for different engines.
Your sitemap is created in a separate XML file. This file contains the distinct URLs of all the pages on your website. When a searchbot reads the sitemap file, it learns about all the pages on your website—and can then crawl all those pages for submittal to the search engine's index.
By the way, the new unified sitemap format allows for autodiscovery of your site's sitemap file. Previously, you had to notify each search engine separately about the location of each file on your site. Now you can do this universally by specifying the file's location in your site's robots.txt file.
While you could create a sitemap file by hand, it's far easier to generate that sitemap automatically. To that end, many third-party sitemap-generator tools exist for just that purpose. For most of these tools, generating a sitemap is as simple as entering your home page URL and then pressing a button.
The tool now crawls your website and automatically generates a sitemap file; once the sitemap file is generated, you can then upload it to the root directory of your website, reference it in your robots.txt file, and, if you like, submit it directly to each of the major search engines.
TIP #8: Use Text Instead of Images
It's important to know that today's generation of search engines parse only text content; they can't figure out what a picture or video or Flash animation is about, unless you describe it in the text. So if you use graphic buttons or banners (instead of plain text) to convey important information, the search engines simply won't see it. You need to put every piece of important information somewhere in the text of the page—even if it's duplicated in a banner or graphic.
So if you use images on your site, which you probably do, make sure that you use the ALT tag for each image—and assign meaningful keywords to the image via this tag. A searchbot will read the ALT tag text; it can't figure out what an image is without it.
Similarly, don't hide important information in Flash animations, JavaScript applets, video files, and the like. Remember, searchbots can only find text on your page—all those non-text elements are invisible to a search engine
TIP #9: Update Your Content Frequently
It pays to constantly update your site. Because most searchbots crawl the Web with some frequency, looking for pages that have changed or updated content, your ranking can be affected if your site hasn't changed in a while. So you'll want to make sure that you change your content on a regular basis; in particular, changing the content of your heading tags can have a big impact on how "fresh" the search engine thinks your site is.
TIP #10: Know Your Customer
This final tip is a piece of business advice I've been hawking for the past two decades. Everything you do in business—or on your website—should come in service to your customers. You don't develop a new product just because you have the capability; you do it because it's something your customers want.
To that end, knowing what your customers want is the most important part of your business. If you know your customers, you can develop a website that they will want to visit—and that search engines will want to rank highly. Know what your customers want and you'll know what kind of content to create, and how to present that content.
And because SEO starts with your optimizing site's content, the better and more relevant that content, the higher your site will rank with Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines.
Know your customer, and everything else follows.
