10 SEO tips for Google, MSN and Yahoo
My guess is that if you’re looking at SEO articles, you’re a novice on the subject. Here I’ll show you ten easy ways to better optimize your site for search engines. These tips are not only great for beginners, but also for experienced webmasters. Check out these 10 search engine optimization tips and apply them to your site. Remember, search engines are not a magic wand! But they are a great way to drive additional traffic to your site. Getting to the top of any search engine doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time, patience, and hard work.
1.) Great content
If you spend all your time worrying about ways to get traffic and don’t spend time working on content, your site will never get anywhere. If your content is good, people will willingly give you non-reciprocal links. SEO, traffic techniques and everything else is secondary, your content is the reason people visit your site. Even if you do a great job of getting people through the door, if your content is bad, they won’t come back.
2.) “Link to us” and “Add a link”
Create a “Link to Us” and “Add a Link” page and add them to your sitemap. This lets other webmasters visiting your site know that you are open to link exchanges. Also, you want to make it as easy as possible for other people to link to your site. For your link to our page, you need to give people numerous options ranging from images to text. Give them the HTML code to copy and paste onto their site. You should not include codes for images that are on your server, this consumes a lot of bandwidth and can even ruin your website statistics by showing more unique IP addresses than actually reached your site. Instead, show the image and tell people to right-click, save as, and then upload to your own server.
3.) Links, links and more links
All search engines take into account how many links point to your site on other pages. You should avoid indiscriminate links to other sites in unrelated fields, as well as links to sites that are not indexed by Google, as they may have been penalized and could penalize your site as well. The best way to get back links is to visit sites with a similar theme, look for a “link to us” or similar page, and then look up any contact information for that site. Put your links on your page first, then contact the other site’s webmaster telling them you’d like to do a link exchange and where they can find your link on their site. Then request a reciprocal link and provide them with your link information. You should avoid submitting your link information in html format because some webmasters don’t like that. Instead, tell them the TITLE, URL, and DESCRIPTION of your page
4.) Don’t Optimize for the Bad Keywords
You’re probably thinking that the more times a keyword is searched for, the better it is to optimize for that keyword. MISTAKEN! In fact, it’s the complete opposite of that. If you are a new page with little to no page rank, it will be hard to show up for high competition keywords. The best way to decide which keywords to optimize for is to divide the number of times that phrase is searched for by the number of pages that appear for that search on Google. This gives you the lookup to results relationship. The higher the ratio, the better you are optimizing for that keyword or keyword phrase.
http://www.goodkeywords.com/ – Free software that tells you how often keywords are being searched for.
5.) Use a different page title than your URL (home page only!)
If your homepage URL is “All-about-horseracing.com”, you are almost 100% guaranteed to appear as the number 1 result for the search “All about horseracing”. So why would you want that to be the title of your page as well? If you make your page title “Horse Racing Strategies”, it will probably show up in that search as well. Make your page title the exact search phrase you want to appear for. This only works well for your home page, for subdomains it’s a good idea to have your subdomain URL and your page title with the same keyword phrase.
6.) Use description meta tags with keyword phrases you want to appear for
In your description meta tag, you should use keywords and keyword phrases that you would like to appear for. Your description meta tag and your page title is what a potential visitor sees in search engines.
7.) Use h1, h2 and h3 tags
These tags let search engines know what your most important keywords are. h1 is for your main keywords. h2 and h3 are for your secondary keywords.
8.) Keywords in unexpected places
Did you know that search engines don’t just look for keywords in the content of your pages? They also look at your URL and the names of the files on your site. Since search engines can’t tell what’s in an image on your site, they rely on its alt tag and file name. You can use ANY image for this. Also, put keywords in your URL. All words in URLs and file names must be separated by hyphens.
9.) First and last words
Add your desired keyword phrase (only 1 per page!) to the beginning and end of your page. Your desired search phrase is more likely to appear if you add it to the beginning and end of your page.
example: [http://www.thunderfap.com/daily-giveaways.htm]
10.) Bold, Underline, Italicize
Of all the places you can put keywords, you can also make certain words or phrases stand out in search engines by highlighting, underlining, or italicizing them. However, do not overdo it. You shouldn’t ‘keyword stuff’. A long time ago, when search engines were just getting started, they used to only look at how often a keyword phrase was repeated on a page. Many pages rose to the top of the search engines simply by repeating the same words over and over again. Search engines have long since changed their tactics, now you can even be penalized for “keyword stuffing”, so don’t go overboard.
11.) Bonuses! Check out Free Webmaster Tools [http://www.thunderfap.com/webmaster-freebies.htm] My Site Section
A list of very useful free sites that webmasters can use to improve their site’s ranking and traffic. Backlink generators, meta tag generators, robots.txt generators, html error fixer, google sitemap generator and much more!
This article may be freely distributed ONLY if none of the content is modified. Including the 11th bonus tip, all links, author credits, and this disclaimer. It can only be distributed for free, you cannot charge for this item.