No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO,
it is not as complicated as many would lead you to
believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in
the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank,
Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms...
SEO is really simple to do if you understand some
basic concepts and follow some easy steps.
Search Engine Optimization is getting your content
listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and
MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a
keyword search in a search engine for your particular
subject or niche - you want your site or content to be
at the top of the list.
Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are
working for me at this moment in time. I make this
clarification because you must understand search
engines, especially Google, are constantly redefining
how they rank pages. Here are my favorite SEO tips, tactics
and strategies:
1. Quality Content is and always will be your number
one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them.
You must understand search engines are simply businesses
who supply a product like any other company. That product
is information. They must offer quality results to anyone
using their service to solve a problem, answer a question
or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted
the search solution they return, the higher the overall
quality of their product and the more popular their search
engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for
SEO success.
2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high
rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work
on the web. You must know how many searches are made each
day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and
Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches.
Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don't
forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site.
Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and
not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords
with medium to low competition has worked out well for me.
So too has using the more targeted and higher converting
"long-tail" keywords been very beneficial for me.
3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major
role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content.
Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all
your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages
should be no more than three levels away from it - keeping
a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search
engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such
as title, description, keywords... are all optimized.
(Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160
characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be
keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression
anyone will see of your site - make sure you use them to draw
and entice interested visitors to your site and content.
Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for
maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name
also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements
of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having
your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.
4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so
concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google.
Don't ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search
so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser,
Google's influence will only grow stronger so you must
optimize your pages for Google. Use Google's Webmaster
Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content
for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my
niche keywords and for comment link-building on the
newly created pages Google is indexing.
5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost
your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from
relevant sites related to your niche market and make
sure the 'anchor text' is related to your keywords but
don't ignore the text and overall quality of the content
linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable
portion of a link. Don't forget linking is a two-way street,
make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant
sites in your niche.
6. Article Marketing is a well established method of
getting quality backlinks and it still works. Writing
short 500 - 700 word informative and helpful articles
with your backlinks in the resource box is still very
effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks.
Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an
extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle,
Isnare, Thephantomwriters... plus other major online sites.
Don't forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds
in your article distribution. And always remember you're
also using these articles to pre-sale your content or
products. Don't forget to leverage sites like Squidoo,
Hubpages... to increase your rankings and traffic.
7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me.
These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted
to one sub-division of your major theme. For example,
if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could
be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out
with extensive pages covering everything dealing with
wedding gifts - a self-contained keyword rich portion of
your site on wedding gifts. Works similar as a sub-domain
but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as
yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always
using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked
fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content
rich hubs but keep in mind you're creating content to
first satisfy your visitors.
8. WordPress Blog Software is extremely effective for SEO
purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your
site even if you have no experience with installing server-side
scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly
blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging.
I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in
the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked.
I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other
free blogs to help distribute my content.
9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important
on the web. These include a whole range of social sites like
MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter... media news sites like Digg,
SlashDot, Technorati... you must get your content into this
whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0
sites. You should be joining these sites and using them.
It's time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of
things. One simple thing you must do is to put social
bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors
can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a
WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service
from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on
all my content.
10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget
to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it
comes to SEO. You must have an understanding of what SEO is
and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly,
you just don't want SEO - you want effective SEO. In order
to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance,
Authority and Conversions.
First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic
or niche area you're pursuing - your content must fit in
and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That's
why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines,
they give only relevant content to what's been searched
for or discussed.
Second, your content/site must be perceived as an
authority site on your subject or niche. Establish
this authority position and the search engines will
love you and your content. One way is to develop
this authority, besides offering superior content,
is to form links/partnerships with other perceived
authority sites in your field. Always strive to make
your site an authority site - tops in your niche - the
one site everyone has to check before drawing or
forming a conclusion.
Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO
efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic
into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat
visitors. If you're into online marketing, conversions
will be the most important element of the whole SEO
process because you want buyers, not just visitors
coming to your site.
Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine
Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent
of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe.
Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic
you're seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics
listed above and you will have SEO working for you and
your site in no time at all.
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