There are many ways to utilize SEO to make your website more search engine friendly. Here are five quick tips that people often miss:
• Meta Tags- I know some readers are thinking: “Yes, I’ve got my meta tags filled out…tell me something new!” Well just having words in them doesn’t mean that the value of what they can do is being maximized. You want to make sure your primary keyword or phrase is in the title tag. Also, pack your description tag with your keywords. Of course not to the point where it sounds unnatural to read, but a good description tag with as many keywords as you can reasonably use works wonders for the search engines. And one last important thing: complete meta tags for each page in your site. Target different keywords for each page. Depending on what’s in that page, make each tag in each page fit the keywords and relevancy of that particular page.
• Links- Hyperlink a few of your keywords to outside authority sites. For example if one of your keywords is “search engine”, then link that word to an article or story about search engines on CNN.com. Wikipedia is another good authority site to link to. And of course you can find ample pages to link any given keyword to it.
• Sitemap- Search engines love sitemap pages. If you don’t have one, make one! For example: www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml. This needs to be the last thing you do when building your site so you can include all the completed pages in it. When making your sitemap, double check to see if all your pages have proper meta tags filled out. And be sure to have a link in your website to your sitemap page. There’s a great sitemap tool at www.xml-sitemaps.com. You can simply give them your URL and they will automatically generate a sitemap page for you.
• Offpage Intelligence- Obviously the more inbound links to your site, the more authority your site will have. But how you go about getting those links is important. They need to seem natural, like they are from the everyday use of exchanging information on the internet. For example if you get hundreds of inbound links pointing to your landing page from link directories within the span of a couple days…your site might be frowned upon by the search engines. So do a natural mix of link directories, postings on authority forums and articles that link back to your site. *Very important: When making inbound links, use your primary keyword or phrase less than 10% of the time- use other creative words and phrases instead. And make sure to send most of those links to internal pages in your site rather than your landing page.
• Updates- Have a few pages that you can update. For example a blog that you can post to every few days. Other ideas are to have videos that you can change or add to, or a page with articles. You can always easily find new relevant articles to add to a page or directory in your site that will both enhance the value of the content in your site as well as make it appear to be a lively, evolving site. Search engines love this. If things are changing and growing every time the search engine’s spiders crawl you site, it will look like your site is getting a lot of quality traffic and things are progressing nicely.
• Meta Tags- I know some readers are thinking: “Yes, I’ve got my meta tags filled out…tell me something new!” Well just having words in them doesn’t mean that the value of what they can do is being maximized. You want to make sure your primary keyword or phrase is in the title tag. Also, pack your description tag with your keywords. Of course not to the point where it sounds unnatural to read, but a good description tag with as many keywords as you can reasonably use works wonders for the search engines. And one last important thing: complete meta tags for each page in your site. Target different keywords for each page. Depending on what’s in that page, make each tag in each page fit the keywords and relevancy of that particular page.
• Links- Hyperlink a few of your keywords to outside authority sites. For example if one of your keywords is “search engine”, then link that word to an article or story about search engines on CNN.com. Wikipedia is another good authority site to link to. And of course you can find ample pages to link any given keyword to it.
• Sitemap- Search engines love sitemap pages. If you don’t have one, make one! For example: www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml. This needs to be the last thing you do when building your site so you can include all the completed pages in it. When making your sitemap, double check to see if all your pages have proper meta tags filled out. And be sure to have a link in your website to your sitemap page. There’s a great sitemap tool at www.xml-sitemaps.com. You can simply give them your URL and they will automatically generate a sitemap page for you.
• Offpage Intelligence- Obviously the more inbound links to your site, the more authority your site will have. But how you go about getting those links is important. They need to seem natural, like they are from the everyday use of exchanging information on the internet. For example if you get hundreds of inbound links pointing to your landing page from link directories within the span of a couple days…your site might be frowned upon by the search engines. So do a natural mix of link directories, postings on authority forums and articles that link back to your site. *Very important: When making inbound links, use your primary keyword or phrase less than 10% of the time- use other creative words and phrases instead. And make sure to send most of those links to internal pages in your site rather than your landing page.
• Updates- Have a few pages that you can update. For example a blog that you can post to every few days. Other ideas are to have videos that you can change or add to, or a page with articles. You can always easily find new relevant articles to add to a page or directory in your site that will both enhance the value of the content in your site as well as make it appear to be a lively, evolving site. Search engines love this. If things are changing and growing every time the search engine’s spiders crawl you site, it will look like your site is getting a lot of quality traffic and things are progressing nicely.
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