It can be very difficult for small businesses to compete on a global level for competitive terms with high profile companies, especially on a small business budget. But that doesn’t mean with hard work and determination that you can’t be competitive and build and market your brand and website successfully. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an opportunity for small businesses to enhance their performance within a limited budget. SEO now becomes a hot topic with a lot of debates. How do you get your web site within the first page or two of the search engines? How do you increase your Google page rank? Here are the 10 SEO tips that would be useful for your website.1. Content
There is no surprise that content formatting and presentation for the content are the main part of SEO process to build up interest and create huge amount of traffic to a website. Quality content should be compelling, informative, relevant and updated. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags, titles, image tags, etc., but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt. Quality content will bring people back and create word of mouth to get forward links from other sites. The more the better!
2. Website Design
First of all, spend some money on web design to attract more visitors. In addition, going hand in hand with web design is developing user experience. It is better to spend some time with a professional web developer who has experience with site usability. Placement of elements in a web design really do matter, and the navigation of your site is very important if you want your visitors to effectively find and meet your end goals.
3. Keyword Density
This is very important section of your SEO crusade. Keyword research can guide you about which keywords have high volume or least competition. However, you should be smart in keyword strategy, by not relying on popular keywords but also looking into long-tail keyword options and local search results. In addition, a look out on keyword density, which is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase area of your web page text, is also important in SEO
4. Incoming Links
Link building is probably one of the most important parts of any SEO campaign. Back links must be collected from different off page SEO activities and only quality back links are considered by Google. The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site. Instead of spending the time, effort and money on artificial links, put that into your own site content or SEO budget and watch others link to you willingly and naturally.
5. Meta Tags
Meta tags are placed in the head section of a web page. Some people may tell that meta tags don’t matter. The biggest thing they matter for is click-through though. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Therefore, meta tag content is actually known as a weapon for top search engine positions; however, this is not as easy as it looks like. For adding content, description and keywords in Meta tag it requires a lot of research. Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don’t stuff it with keywords either. The description tag should read like a sentence — not a keyword list.
6. Heading tags
Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good website will have. When you are laying out your site’s content you have to be sure that you are creating the content flow in such a way that the heading tags are based on prominence. The most prominent of course being the heading tag, which says this is what this block of copy is about. That’s the little “tooltip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.
Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.
7. Domain, URL Structure & Website Title
First, it can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the better it is not spam and can do well in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit.
Second, ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important. Complex URLs are often dubbed dirty URLs because they tend to be littered with punctuation and identifiers that are at best irrelevant to the search engines. Having a descriptive URL still assists search engines in determining what is on a page
Last, making sure that you have the right web site titles for your pages is extremely important. The keywords you place in your title are important in order to ensure that your topic is understood by Google. One of the primary factors for ranking is if the title is on-topic with the search results. Not only is it important for robots to index and understand the topic of the page either. Try to put keywords that describe your product / services optimally in title of a page to get good results. It is important for click-through rates in the search results.
8. Internal Linking & Sitemaps
Making sure that your internal linking helps robots and visitors to find the content on your site is huge. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell the robots and of course, visitors more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page. You do want to make sure that on pages you don’t want to rank in Google that you add a no-follow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your site’s topic and interests. No one is going to be searching Google to find out what your terms of service or privacy policy are.
In addition, search engines also use XML Sitemaps in order to index through your site. For a dynamic website, use of xml sitemap is very much essential. Otherwise crawlers will not be able to search all the pages of your website.
9. Image Optimization
Through Image optimization search engines can drive many visitors who search for images. Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings. In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader. They can’t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is.
10. Social Media Optimization
SMO is considered as the part of SEO these days. It actually focuses on driving traffic from sources other than search engines. There are many social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace, Digg, Stumbleupon etc. in which we can submit our web pages and gets a lot of unique visitors. This also includes participation in discussion groups, commenting on other websites, blogging and posting status updates on social networking websites etc.
Do you have any tips and tricks that you would like to add? How has traffic from search engines helped the development and growth of your website? Please leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you.
There is no surprise that content formatting and presentation for the content are the main part of SEO process to build up interest and create huge amount of traffic to a website. Quality content should be compelling, informative, relevant and updated. You can put all the keywords you want in the meta tags, titles, image tags, etc., but if the actual readable text on the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it ends up basically being a futile attempt. Quality content will bring people back and create word of mouth to get forward links from other sites. The more the better!
2. Website Design
First of all, spend some money on web design to attract more visitors. In addition, going hand in hand with web design is developing user experience. It is better to spend some time with a professional web developer who has experience with site usability. Placement of elements in a web design really do matter, and the navigation of your site is very important if you want your visitors to effectively find and meet your end goals.
3. Keyword Density
This is very important section of your SEO crusade. Keyword research can guide you about which keywords have high volume or least competition. However, you should be smart in keyword strategy, by not relying on popular keywords but also looking into long-tail keyword options and local search results. In addition, a look out on keyword density, which is the percent that your keyword or keyword phrase area of your web page text, is also important in SEO
4. Incoming Links
Link building is probably one of the most important parts of any SEO campaign. Back links must be collected from different off page SEO activities and only quality back links are considered by Google. The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site. Instead of spending the time, effort and money on artificial links, put that into your own site content or SEO budget and watch others link to you willingly and naturally.
5. Meta Tags
Meta tags are placed in the head section of a web page. Some people may tell that meta tags don’t matter. The biggest thing they matter for is click-through though. There will be a lot of times when Google will use your meta description as the copy that gets pulled with your search listing. This can help to attract the visitor to visit your web site if it is related to their search query. Therefore, meta tag content is actually known as a weapon for top search engine positions; however, this is not as easy as it looks like. For adding content, description and keywords in Meta tag it requires a lot of research. Be sure to include a few relevant keywords in this tag, but don’t stuff it with keywords either. The description tag should read like a sentence — not a keyword list.
6. Heading tags
Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good website will have. When you are laying out your site’s content you have to be sure that you are creating the content flow in such a way that the heading tags are based on prominence. The most prominent of course being the heading tag, which says this is what this block of copy is about. That’s the little “tooltip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.
Construction of your title tag is one of the most important things you need to do. Each page should have a different title with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. When search engine results are displayed the title is the first thing people see.
7. Domain, URL Structure & Website Title
First, it can help to have keywords you are interested in ranking for within your domain, but only as much as the title, heading and content matters. One very important factor that is coming to light is that domain age is important. The older the site or domain, the better it is not spam and can do well in search results. The domain age definitely isn’t a make or break factor but it does help quite a bit.
Second, ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important. Complex URLs are often dubbed dirty URLs because they tend to be littered with punctuation and identifiers that are at best irrelevant to the search engines. Having a descriptive URL still assists search engines in determining what is on a page
Last, making sure that you have the right web site titles for your pages is extremely important. The keywords you place in your title are important in order to ensure that your topic is understood by Google. One of the primary factors for ranking is if the title is on-topic with the search results. Not only is it important for robots to index and understand the topic of the page either. Try to put keywords that describe your product / services optimally in title of a page to get good results. It is important for click-through rates in the search results.
8. Internal Linking & Sitemaps
Making sure that your internal linking helps robots and visitors to find the content on your site is huge. Using relevant copy throughout your site will tell the robots and of course, visitors more effectively what to expect on the corresponding page. You do want to make sure that on pages you don’t want to rank in Google that you add a no-follow tag to ensure that the ranking flow of your site corresponds with your site’s topic and interests. No one is going to be searching Google to find out what your terms of service or privacy policy are.
In addition, search engines also use XML Sitemaps in order to index through your site. For a dynamic website, use of xml sitemap is very much essential. Otherwise crawlers will not be able to search all the pages of your website.
9. Image Optimization
Through Image optimization search engines can drive many visitors who search for images. Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings. In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader. They can’t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is.
10. Social Media Optimization
SMO is considered as the part of SEO these days. It actually focuses on driving traffic from sources other than search engines. There are many social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace, Digg, Stumbleupon etc. in which we can submit our web pages and gets a lot of unique visitors. This also includes participation in discussion groups, commenting on other websites, blogging and posting status updates on social networking websites etc.
Do you have any tips and tricks that you would like to add? How has traffic from search engines helped the development and growth of your website? Please leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you.
