The 10 Top SEO Tips
1 - Backlinks
Backlinks are vital, if not the only thing that you should spend most of your SEO time on. Backlinks are links pointing to your site from other websites. They are used highly in ALL Search Engine Algorithms, and are one of the key factors, if not the most important factor, which decides which sites to rank higher than other websites.
2 - Title Tag
For all of the pages on your site, make sure they have a unique title tag. One of the most important things to determine what a page is about for search engine spiders is the title tag, so it must be unique for all your pages, and make sure it matches the content on what the page is about or visa versa. Its very important to make sure each page is unique in sense of the title tag.
3 - Choose the right Keywords
You could spend 6 months optimising a website for your chosen keywords, and now you could even rank no.1. Congratulations, but remember, its only worth being the top if people actually search for it. This is what must be at the start of every SEO campaign, choosing rank able keywords that are searched for, and are relevant to what your website offers. So many companies go out there choosing any old keyword, and expect it will bring them lots of clients and visitors when it ranks highly. If its not a searched for phrase, you WONT get traffic!
4 - Unique Content
If your site is just simply copying articles from other websites, lets face it, you are never going to get anywhere. You could be faced with duplicate content issues, and your site will never get the authorative respect you could earn if you wrote your own content. Here at ViperChill, we submit all our articles to other sites in order to gain links from those sites. However, we also have a Blog which is full of fresh, unique content which we also get credited for. Unique content is a must to set you apart from the rest, and keep your website with a good chance in the “game” of SEO.
5 - Updating Content
Its important to keep content updating regularly. Search Engines’ love content, they want to index as much unique content as they can to fill their servers with, in order to have the largest possible variety to display to users of its search. If you constantly update your content, search engine spiders are going to constantly come back to your site with the expectation there will be more content for them to spider, and you will notice your site new pages being indexed quicker, and your site overall spidered more often.
6 - Linking
Make sure that you have some form of good link structure on your site, so that not only visitors, but also search engine spiders can find additional pages of your website to spider and indexed in its database. Linking is a great way to increase internal links to your pages, and get new pages spidered quickly. This encourages spiders to look deeper into your website for more pages and more information, so that you get a good deep index.
7 - Let your keywords shine
Its very important that for relevancy and good on page optimisation of your website, that your keywords you are aiming a certain page towards, gets full attention. The best way to do such things could be to use <b>tags</b> to let search engine spiders know the word is important, you can also use <i>tags</i> as to not affect the readers experience, but still let the search engine spiders know that certain text is of more importance. Be careful to make sure you dont do this in excess - about 5 times on a page is the maximum recommended.
8 - Create a sitemap
This can be a html sitemap you have created yourself, or it can be a generated xml sitemap you can submit to the likes of Google. A sitemap is a list of all the pages in your site so that they are easily findable for search engine spiders, and that all pages get indexed, or at least spidered.
9 - Don’t Keyword Stuff / Spam
Don’t stuff your keyword descriptions and meta information with keywords. This is a possible penalisation penalty in search engines and you really dont want that to happen. Have a fair number of keywords, making sure they are all slightly modifications of each other, and include a maximum of 10 per page, that way you can make sure you are not keyword stuffing, yet still have a good range of keywords in there at the same time!
10 - Optimise your site for visitors, not search engines
At the end of the day, its the visitors who need to know the most about a website. If theres keywords all over the place, and its un-readable, people aren’t going to come back to your site. It’s all about the visitors first, and spiders second. So make it for the visitors, then any “tweaks” you can make to SEO optimise the pages is a bonus!