So often we get the question “So how do you SEO a website?” In this article on how to SEO your website we touch on various factors involved making your website Search Engine Friendly.
Writing quality pieces of content that is meant for people first, and search engines second, is essential. In essence it means you should write quality content that is useful and engaging for humans and search engines will recognize your efforts. Content that is engaging has a higher chance to be shared among social media networks, generating free traffic to your website.
Also share your articles with the world and submit them to websites like Reddit, Digg and even Delicious. These content aggregators might gain you a few readers.
Rewrite some of your older content on your website with your SEO hat on. Update your image attributes, look at your keywords density, and add links referring to other relevant content on your website. The chances are that you know more on the content of the article now then you did a year ago, and search engines just love new content on a website encouraging them to pay more attention (don’t we all love some attention).
It’s harsh outside in the big world of the internet, and you wish to be popular? Well what you need is a vote of confidence.
The process which we will use is call link building and gets trusted websites to point to your website. Always remember that quality is better than quantity. You can publish a blog, use a RSS feed, social media networks, or even requests links pointing to your website from websites relating to your industry.
Your popularity on the internet is measure by a metric called PageRank (PR) originally invented by Larry Page; co-founder of Google.
FACT: Search Engines do not recognize the content of any picture at the moment.
Ever click on the “images” tab in a search engine and search for your favorite holiday destination and got pictures relevant on it?
It involves doing all the nitty-gritty and giving your images a title, some alternate text and even a description so the search engine can identify what the picture is all about. So out of confusion you have created order and now the Search Engine can display results relevant to the title, alternate text and description you put in.
I’m sure we all have seen the classic “For more information click here”. Those types of links are BAD. Why you ask?
Search Engines consider those internal links as emphasis on that text, and emphasis on “click here” is a waste of precious space where you could have used a keyword as the anchor text which describes the page the user will be taken. Instead of using the poor example above, a proper use of anchor text would be; “Try our delectable range of pirate hats for your theme party”
Don’t overdo the amount of anchor text on your website, put emphasis on your main products and keywords that you wish to focus on.
It has been said people on the internet do not read, it doesn’t mean that we should deprive them of good quality content. When writing content try to stick around 250 words per page. 250 Words per page will give you a good length of text to include related terms and emphasis on your targeted keywords.
Content on your website should always be unique from any other websites on the web. Duplicate content confuses a search engine on how to decide which one is more relevant than the other. It is most cases Search Engines will display the original before the duplicate piece.
Header tags are headings, so treat them as headings (just like those you find in books and even magazines). In HTML we have various header tags for example;
Meta tags of course, pieces of code in the header section of your webpage. This is how they generally look like;
A good sitemap is crucial so that search engines and visitors can easily find all the pages on your website. Imagine a sitemap as the “you are here” map in a huge shopping centre. As your website grows and expand it is crucial to make sure that search engines and people alike know what pages are available on your website. It also makes it easier for a search engine to recognize if you have any new content on your website, without re-indexing everything.
Sitemaps comes in 2 flavors, HTML and XML. The HTML sitemap is viewable by your visitors in a structured and ordered manner. The XML sitemap is submitted to Webmaster Tool accounts (Google and Bing) where you can prioritize certain pages and intervals for indexing within the XML document.
Social Media, everybody is part of it and has integrated it into part of their daily routine and schedule, the need to be constantly connected has infected nearly everyone. It is essential that your website works seamlessly together with all your social interactions on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Myspace, Google +, Pinterest, and the list continues
A “like” or a “follow” is a GREAT commendation for your business/website. We all know pyramid schemes, just imagines this is a pyramid scheme without the catch. The amount of people that you could reach via the social media platforms exceeds millions. Imagine you have 1 friend on Facebook. Your friend has 5 friends, and those 5 friends have 10 friends each. You can just imagine the possible reach via these platforms.
Posting and sharing your newest products, latest developments, and epic articles are easily shared on these different platforms.