No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as
complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno
jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank,
Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms... SEO is really simple to
do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.
Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the
top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When
someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular
subject or niche - you want your site or content to be at the top of the
list.
Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at
this moment in time. I make this clarification because you must
understand search engines, especially Google, are constantly redefining
how they rank pages. Here are my favorite tactics and strategies:
1.
Quality Content is and always will be your number one
factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand
search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other
company. That product is information. They must offer quality results
to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or
to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search
solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product
and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality
content is vital for SEO success.
2.
Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high
rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You
must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords.
Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number
of searches. Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don't
forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and
build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your
home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition
has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and
higher converting "long-tail" keywords been very beneficial for me.
3.
Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in
the spidering and indexing of your site/content. Make sure all your
pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from
your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from
it - keeping a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search
engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title,
description, keywords... are all optimized. (Title = around 65
characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title
and description should not only be keyword targeted but these are the
first contact/impression anyone will see of your site - make sure you
use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and
content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for
maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name also
helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has
helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and
last 25 words on your pages.
4.
Google will send you the most qualified traffic so
concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google. Don't ignore
Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it
deserves. With its new browser, Google's influence will only grow
stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google's
Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for
Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my niche keywords and
for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.
5.
Link Building is still the most effective way to boost
your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites
related to your niche market and make sure the 'anchor text' is related
to your keywords but don't ignore the text and overall quality of the
content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable
portion of a link. Don't forget linking is a two-way street, make sure
you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in your niche.
6.
Article Marketing
is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it
still works. Writing short 500 - 700 word informative helpful articles
with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for
getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked
for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including
SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters... plus other major online
sites. Don't forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your
article distribution. And always remember you're also using these
articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don't forget to leverage
sites like Squidoo, Hubpages... to increase your rankings and traffic.
7.
Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me. These
traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division
of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then
wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed
out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts -
a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts.
Works similar as a sub-domain but I prefer using a directory to divide
it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always
using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.)
Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind
you're creating content to first satisfy your visitors.
8.
WordPress blog software is extremely effective for SEO
purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you
have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search
engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured
content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my
sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and
ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free
blogs to help distribute my content.
9.
Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on
the web. These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace,
FaceBook, Twitter... media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati...
you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full
SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and
using them. It's time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of
things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons
on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content
for you. You can use a WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free
site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on
all my content.
10.
Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to
develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO. You
must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you
and your site. More importantly, you just don't want SEO - you want
effective SEO. In order to achieve effective SEO you must have three
things:
Relevance, Authority and Conversions.
First, your content/site must be
relevant to the topic
or niche area you're pursuing - your content must fit in and be related
to all the other sites in your niche. That's why closely themed sites
do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to
what's been searched for or discussed.
Second, your content/site must be perceived as an
authority
site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and
the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop
this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form
links/partnerships with other perceived authority sites in your field.
Always strive to make your site an authority site - tops in your niche -
the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a
conclusion.
Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO
efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site
members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you're into
online marketing,
conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.
Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine
Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online
bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can
give you the targeted traffic you're seeking, just follow some of the
outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for
you and your site in no time at all.