Using Search Engine Optimisation to get good results from the likes of Google is essential for any webmaster. Whether you’re using SEO to increase organic traffic from the big search engines or you’re using SEO to improve your ranking in Google, these top 10 basic SEO tips will help get you started.
1. The title of your webpage is key
Search engine spiders will crawl through your pages to get information about your website which will be placed in the search engines results. Having a decent well informed title is one of the most important SEO methods and the webmaster should use keywords related to their website content.
2. A sitemap is very useful
Having a Sitemap page on your website is very useful and almost all search engine crawlers will know where they’re heading on your website and if your pages are well linked together it makes it much easier for the crawler to gain information and place it on their search results.
3. Back links
One of the better ways to gain a higher ranking in search engines is to have thousands of back links linked to your website from other sites. One of the best ways to achieve this is to either pay for permanent links to your site or submit your website’s content to directories and article directories if you have articles to submit.
4. Anchor text & links
It is essential to use relevant anchor text when linking back to your website. An example of anchor text for a website design company and search marketing company could be “website design” or “search engine optimisation”.
This helps the crawler know exactly what your website is about and what keywords you’re targetting, so when “website design” is typed in a search engine then you will stand a better chance of appearing on the first few pages.
5. Vary your title information
Having the same title on each page of your website isn’t the best way to go about things and if you have thousands of pages search engines will probably think you’re “keyword stuffing” and your website will likely be sandboxed.
Make sure you change the title of all your pages so you’ll most likely get searched by other keyword variations.
6. Using black hat methods will get you sandboxed
One of the black hat methods we discussed earlier was “Keyword Stuffing” & another is linking to and from link farms. Link farms are websites that displays thousands of links to other websites and usually classed as spam by the top search engines.
7. Use images wisely
Images have a simple method of being SEO’d as well so if you have a gallery of pictures and want pictures displayed in the “images” part of Google then this method is perfect if used correctly. You should vary your alt tag so you’ll not be sandboxed for keyword stuffing.
8. Take advantage of the common HTML tags
If you want to target a specific keyword then sometimes wrapping the b or ul tags can work wonders. While this isn’t always recommended to do around all of the keywords you’re targetting a couple of times is usually enough.
9. Take advantage of your back links
When other websites link back to your website they only usually link back to your main page, while this is still good you can still take advantage of it. Get linked to different pages of your website as well so search engines realise that you have lots of useful content throughout your website.
10. Get a steady flow of visitors
Produce useful content and visitors will just keep coming back and back. Another good way to keep your visitors informed of website updates and new content is to get them to either add your rss feed or register to a weekly newsletter that keeps them informed of all the goings on.
