Though you can find SEO tips all over the Internet, But this is the Best.The top 10 SEO tips I’ve listed below is what has successfully worked for me. I’ve landed many sites on first pages in both local and national terms. Though SEO is much more than just these 10 tips, this should get you going in the right direction.
- Write unique page title tags using keywords and a comma separator.
Now you might be thinking, DUH! Everyone knows that you should write unique titles to every page and that they should contain keywords. You’re Right! But what you might have missed is the comma separator. Many people like to use different separators such as the pipe “|” or the hypen “-” or even the underscore “_”. I’ve used them all, and none of them have as good of results as using a comma. Also, once I have placed my keywords at the beginning with commas separating, I always use a hyphen and list the site/company name. - Use proper formatting tags.
Search engines love organized content, especially content that is correctly formatted to show what is important on the page. Utilize your header tags, h1, h2, etc. You should never have more than one h1 tag on a page. Also, your navigation, footer links, and any other lists of items should always be put into a ul (unordered list) or ol (ordered list) tag. Even if you change the styles so it doesn’t look like a list, search engines will always associate the items together and as an important part of the page. - Your H1 tag should match, or come close, to your page title.
Two of the most important single lines of text on your page is the page title tag and the h1 tag. Your h1 tag should match or come very close to your header. The search engines will not know what keywords are most important if the two most important tags have different keywords. - Use good file naming structure.
There has been debate whether using a separate directory or individual pages are best. In my experience I’ve found that both work pretty much the same and have hardly any difference. What does make the difference is how you name them.For example, if you’re building a site for a Tampa insurance company and are working on the auto insurance page. Many times, developers will make the name “auto.html”, though this gets one keyword, a much more effective name would be “tampa-auto-insurance.html”. Notice that I hit 3 keywords and they are separated by a hyphen.Besides just the filenames of your pages, make sure you name your images effectively. So if I use the example above and put an image of a car on the auto insurance page, name it something like “auto-insurance.jpg” or even “tampa-auto-insurance.jpg”. Again notice the keywords and hyphens. However, be careful not to get carried away with this, file names should only contain a few words at most, not a sentence. - Make use of the title attribute (NOT TALKING ABOUT THE PAGE TITLE TAG)
This is an attribute that most designers and developers, even experienced ones miss. The title attribute is a part of almost every single html tag. You can also refer to this tag as a tooltip tag. There are 2 benefits to using this tag. First is the benefit for handicap accessibility. When you have a title tag on something, when you hover it will show whatever you have in the tag as a tool tip. The second benefit is that you can summarize to search engines what the tag is doing. Common tags to apply this to is links, paragraph, header and div tags. Example of the tag is:<h1 title="SEO Tips">SEO Tips</h1> - Use inner-page linking.
Linking to other pages within your site from other page content is always good practice. Not only does it help the reader to go to a section you are talking about, but it also helps to increase your PageRank. - Use relevant text and bold your links.
When doing inner-links or outbound-links, you should always use relevant keywords in the text that you link. You should also bold this text. Search engines place more priority to words and links that are bolded and linked. - Link out to other sites, especially related ones.
The last thing you want your site to be is an Internet dead end. If visitors come to your site and the only way to go is back, you will be killing your chances for good search engine optimization. Great sites to link to include social networking sites, your listing on search engine local pages and your profile on 3rd party directory sites. This not only provides roads out from your site, but also gives your site creditable inbound links. Creditable inbound links can greatly increase your sites SEO, but that is not on-site SEO so we won’t discuss it here. - Write VALID code.
This is probably the single most problem that 90% of websites have. There is a reason that the W3 Consortium sets standards for html code. Search engines follow these standards. If your site’s code is not valid, you are running the risk of search engines not properly or fully indexing your site. You can validate your own site, or any site by visiting http://validator.w3.org/ (Notice my outbound link and the title applied – always trying to increase SEO) - If your site is dynamic, utilize URL re-writing.
This is another tool that can be utilized to produce amazing results, especially if your site has hundreds of pages. Those urls that look like Chinese don’t do you one bit of good. Remember from tip #4 – File names are VERY important. Take this site for example, yeah we could have gone the easy way and make crazy looking urls, but we want you to find us, so look at the url for this page. That isn’t the real name of this page. The real name is webdeveloperpost.com/articles/default.aspx? + a bunch of chinese looking stuff. However, we re-write the page so that search engines see it as you see it in the title bar.Note that this is a very advanced technique that even experienced developers have trouble with. If your site does have lots of dynamic pages with ugly urls, it will be in your best interest to hire a developer to program URL re-writing for you. - Extra – Keep important content toward the top.
I know this says 10 tips, but this is important as well so I thought I’d throw it in. It is important to keep your most important content at the top. Many people say DUH! but you’ll be suprised how many people have welcome paragraphs as the first set of test.
As said earlier, there is much more to SEO than just the on-site tricks. However, following the steps above will get your site on its way to being more search engine friendly!
Good job, post is fantastic