This is a list of essential search engine optimization strategies, you will probably learn some other in the long run, but right now I want to give you a list of the initial SEO techniques you have to have in mind when thinking on building your own website.
These practices will increase your chances of getting indexed by Search Engines, better rankings in the search engine’s result pages (serps) and possibly increase the amount of traffic to your site.
SEO is about a series of techniques you do to your website in order to improve the quantity and quality of visitors.
Here are some of the most important practices:
1- Get your own domain name (preferred if it is .com, is the most used on the Internet and people are already used to it). You can check Godaddy.com, to buy your domain name, they’re a Company with good reputation online.
2- Get your own, reliable hosting (a place where your web page is stored to be permanently available to visitors) for your site. A couple of hosting sites you can check are: Dreamhost.com or Pair.com.
3- Do a thoroughly keyword research to find out which are the most important words you should be using in your site, related to your main topic.
4- Add Titles, keywords and descriptions on the head of your page code. Each should be unique and related to the page.
5- Add a robots.txt file at the root of your server: e.g.: http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt
6- Add a Sitemap page to your site: It should contain each page of your site, is like and index for your site, it will help guide visitors and search engine robots for better indexing.
7- Use CSS (cascading style sheets) to arrange the presentation of your Web site. It’s used to define colors, font and layout. This will help you improve the ratio of text/code of your Website, you want to have more text than code.
8- Use your keywords to describe the images in your site: alt tags.
9- Make sure you use H1 and H2 tags for the headings and subheadings of your site, using your keywords.
10- Write articles including your main keywords. Don’t worry about keyword density or frequency, what’s most important is that your article is compelling and useful to your visitors.
11- Link to relevant, quality sites using contextual links (using the keyword of your site).
12- Make sure you don’t have broken links in your site.
13- Try to use bread crumbs on the top of your pages, to make sure your visitors know where they are in your site, e.g.: Home > Marketing > Link Building. This will tell them they are reading an article of the link building section of the category marketing.
14- Get rid of java scripts in the code of your page and put it in an external file.
15- Build 404 pages (when someone reaches to a page that is not found in your site it will show the visitor a custom message instead of getting an error page and loose that visitor). For instance the message could say: Sorry the page you have reached does not exist, please go to our home page: http://www.yoursite.com .
16- Once this is all done submit your site to major Search Engine and Directories and start building links to your site, of course that’s a subject for another post.
You will find a lot more techniques to add to your SEO list of basic practices, but for now these ones will help you get started. Good luck.
Sphere: Related Content
3 comments ↓
Glad I found this as I have lots to learn and some trouble with my site. I saw at BlogCatalog that you used Website Grader. What do you think of it?
I run my site through and get a 48! It won’t pick up the fact that I have a feed even after I added it again in another link. There is now a one click link to my Feedburner feed and a drop down box with 3 choices. Neither are detected by W.G.!
I was told making post titles on my home page h2 would help the grade. Just for fun and to see if this was true, I used a plugin to put ALL my post titles on the home page in h2 and it did not change the grade at all.
I use All In One SEO Pack WordPress plugin and that inserts keywords for all blog entries, but not on the home page. I have not yet figured out how to enter a meta keyword section just for the home page. I am not sure if it really makes a difference though as my blog page, which has keywords that are detected by W.G., still gets the low score.
This SEO stuff is frustrating!
Great information. I run a site promotion blog and one of the things I keep forgetting is the 404 page thing. I’ll have to pass that one along to my readers.
Very nice information… When I will go for SEO new website defiantly I can’t forget all these think
Leave a Comment