Top 10 SEO Techniques
The first thing to remember for SEO is to always make sure you are building your website for your visitors and not the robots, who aren’t quite as interested in what your website has to say.
To begin with you need to make sure that your site is optimized and ready for Google to go through and understand your site. This helps your ranking, and once you are ranked well you then need to ensure that you are persuading the visitors to actually click on your search listing. These 10 steps will help you rank well in Google:
1 - Site Content: This is the number one for any search engine strategy. You need to ensure you have content that is worth viewing, and consistently ensure that there is reason for people to be on your site.
2 - Page Titles: Using great title and topics on your site will bring you more traffic even if you are not number one on Google. People don’t always click on the first result, they pay more attention to the title then to the order of results. The keywords you place in your title are important for Google to understand your topic, and your page will be ranked if the title is on-topic with the search results.
3 - Keyword Density: Keywords on your site are paramount, however you have to be careful that you don’t go overboard and use the keyword too often, but you have to use it often enough that it is going to help you rank better in search engines. Any more than about 5% of the total page copy will start to look a bit spammy, but don’t over-think it, it is all about good, quality copy.
4 - Header Tags: Heading tags should be based on prominence. The most prominent should be the H1 tag, and that should tell the reader what the copy is about. You should only have one or two H1 tags per page, and you should take time to think about what you put into it.
5 - Meta Tags: Meta tags really matter for click through. There will be a lot of instances when Google uses your meta description to pulls through the copy for your search listing, and this copy can help attract the visitor to your website over any others.
6 - Sitemaps: Creating, maintaining and submitting 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. In almost all cases you can name the file sitemap.xml and the search robot for all of the major search engines will find the file.
7 - Incoming Links: Having other sites link to your sites will mean that you are going to be crawled more often. You have to make sure that you have the proper anchor text for your incoming links, and make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site.
8 - Internal Linking: Use relevant copy throughout your site to tell search robots what to expect from your pages. Internal linking helps robots to do this and is very important to helping the search engines find their way around the site. For pages that you don’t want to rank in Google ad a nofollow tag to them and then you can ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your site’s topics and interests.
9 URL Structure: Ensure that your URL structure for each page compliments the content that is on that page. Also ensure that your URL isn’t too long, this would be classed as spam and wouldn’t be indexed by Google.
10 Domain: Last but not least is the age of your domain. The older your site or domain is the better it is likely to do in search results. This isn’t a make or break factor but it definitely helps.