#1 Content

As cliché as it sounds this is the number one for any search marketing strategy, it is impossibly important to ensure that you have content worth viewing. Without this one simply step to ensure that there is a reason for someone to be on your site, everything else is useless. There are a lot of great sites to find inspiration for writing great content that works.

#2 Incoming Links

A link is a link is a link, but without the simplest form you aren’t going to do well in search engines. The more links you have the more often you are going to be crawled. It is also important to make sure that you have the proper anchor text for your incoming links. The easiest way to gain quality links from other sites is to link to sites to let them know your site is there and hope for a reciprocal link. It is also important to make sure that you have content that is worth linking to on your site.

#3 Web site title

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. It is important for click-through rates in the search results. Pay attention to what you click on when you are searching in Google, I know that I don’t always click the first results. Using great titles and topics on your site will bring you more traffic than a number one listing. Most of the time it is within the first page, but I skim through the titles to see which looks to be more on-topic for my search query.

#4 Heading tags

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 h1 tag, which says “this is what this block of copy is about.â€� Making sure you understand heading tag structure is very important. You only want to have one (or two) h1 tags per a page. It is important to not just throw anything into an h1 tag and hope you rank for it.

#5 Internal Linking

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 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 nofollow 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.

#6 Keyword Density

Ensuring that you have the right keyword density for your page and sites topic is paramount. You don’t want to go overboard and use the keyword every 5th word but making sure it “comes upâ€� often is going to help you rank better in search engines. The unspoken rule is no more then 5% of the total copy per a page. Anymore then this and it can start to look a little spammy. Granted, you aren’t shooting for 5% every time. It is really all about context and relevance— just make sure it is good, quality copy.

#7 Sitemaps

It is always a good idea to give search engines a helping hand to find the content that is on your site. Making sure that you create and maintain a sitemap for all of the pages on your site will help the search robots to find all of the pages in your site and index them. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all support sitemaps and most of them offer a great way to ensure that it is finding your sitemap. Most of the time you can simply name it sitemap.xml and the search robot will find the file effectively.

#8 Meta Tags

Everyone will tell you that meta tags don’t matter, they do. 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. Definitely a much overlooked (as of late) ranking factor. Getting indexed by search engines and ranking well is just the first step. The next, and biggest, step is getting that visitor that searched for your keywords to want to click on your search listing.

#9 URL Structure

Ensuring that your URL structure compliments the content that is on the corresponding page is pretty important. There are various methods to make this work, such as modrewrite on apache.

#10 Domain

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.

SEO Tips for Beginners

1. Keywords in <title> tag

One of the most important factor to rank high in your chosen keyword is to have it – your keyword – inside the <title> tag. The <title> tag is what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page. In what I have came to learn is that what appears in the beginning is more important than what comes next.

To give you an idea, let’s take a look at 2 of my chosen keywords – Blog for Beginners & Blogging Tips for Beginners, as the former appears first follows by the latter, naturally Blog for Beginners appears higher than Blogging Tips for Beginners. However, this may not always be the case as other factors such the competitiveness of the keywords are equally important. What I’m trying to say is that you always put your Primary Keyword first.

Now if you are on WordPress, I’d recommend use of an indispensable Platinum SEO plugin to help you optimize your <title> without messing up your theme code.

2. SEO-Friendly URL

By default, WordPress set the permalink structure as www.domain.com/?p=12 which is a big NO NO for Search Engines Optimization (SEO). It doesn’t actually gives any indication to the robot what the url is all about.

In what I have came to learn, the optimal URL structure, according to Matt Cutt with his SEO tips, would be to use only the post title as part of the URL and don’t include the post date in your URL. Not only it is human-readable, more importantly it gives the maximum SEO benefits. How to Optimize Your URL For Search Engines.

3. Proper Use of Keywords in (<H1>, <H2>, <H3>)

Don’t expect the search engine to figure out which are the headlines – it won’t. Instead, use your keywords in the <H1>, <H2>, and <H3> tags to provide clues to the search engine. A good buddy of mine, PB has revealed The Best SEO Tricks Ever that shows you how to optimize your keywords within those headlines.

4. Keywords in Image <alt> tag

Indeed images speak a thousand words but Search Engine Spiders don’t read images, they only read the <alt> tag which is the textual description of the image. Hence, it is important to always provide a meaningful description of an image with your keyword within the <alt> tag. Why you should care with the image ALT attribute.

5. Anchor Text of Inbound & Outbound Links

What is Anchor Text? It’s the word within a hyperlink. Here’s an example, About Yan Susanto, in which “About Yan Susanto” is the anchor text. Not only it gives your readers an idea of about the content of the page you’re linking to, more importantly it tells search engines what the page is about. Used it wisely, it will boost your rankings in search engines, especially in Google. As a rule of thumbs, avoid using “click here” for an anchor text. (See the outbound links on #2 and #3)

6. Origin of Inbound Links

Besides the anchor text, it is your duty to ensure that the sites that link to you is not from bad neighbourhoods. The theory is that it’s better to have one inbound link from a reputable site (generally speaking, sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable) than to have one hundreds links from untrusted sites. Simply said, who links to you does matter.

It’s also important to note that inbound links from sites of similar niche has far more credibility in the eyes of Search Engine than that of unrelated ones. Where Do You Get The Best Quality Inbound Links?

7. The Power of Internal Linking

One important element of SEO that is often overlooked is Internal Linking which, in layman term, means the process of linking to other pages of your site within your archives. I can’t think of a better way to reactivate and rejuvenate the old and buried posts in your archive than to link them internally in your recent post.

You shouldn’t underestimate the power of internal linking in the distribution of your Page Rank – if any, to your internal pages and in helping to improve your search engine results. Link building is never enough without proper internal linking.

8. Links from Directories

I’m not a fan of free directories as IMO having tons of links from PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, but being listed in DMOZ Directory, Yahoo Directory and similar directories will certainly boost for your overall ranking. However, it is almost impossible to get into DMOZ without much of a credibility – and some says ‘certain form of connection from biased editors’. Still it’s one of those things that is worth your while.

9. <Description> metatag

Though metatags are becoming less and less important, there are two metatags that still matter in SEO, these are the <description> and <keywords> metatags. Both are still important from a human and search engine perspective. <Description> metatag is what you use to describe your site. In fact, this description is what the visitors see when your site appears on the search results. How to Create The Perfect Meta Description For Google (& Searchers)

10. <Keywords> metatag

While you are it, fill your <Keywords> tag with relevant keywords. Relevancy here means that every word within <Keywords> metatag must somehow appears somewhere within the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance and considered bad for your ranking. What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula?

11. Use of Robots.txt for Duplicate Content

Basically the purpose of creating a robots.txt file is to improve site indexation by telling search engine crawler to only index your content pages and to ignore other pages (i.e. monthly archives, categories folders or your admin files) that you do not want them to appear on the search index because it may lead to duplicate content issue.

If you are using WordPress, Syed Balkhi wrote a must-read Robots.txt Guide for Wordpress – Avoid Duplicate Content.

12. Use of Sitemap

While Robots.txt instructs search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, a Sitemap tells search engines where you’d like them to go. From a search engine perspective, sitemap is useful for better and faster indexing while a plain HTML sitemap with the use of plugin provides ease of navigation for your visitors.

As such, it is not uncommon to have 2 sitemaps of which one is created for human – your visitors and the other for search engine robots.

1. For Search Engines – You can create a Google Sitemap online and add your Sitemap to your Google Webmaster account or if you are on WordPress, install Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator which will generate XML-Sitemap supported by most of the search engines.
2. For Your Visitors – Clean Archives Reloaded generate a list of your posts sorted by months for better navigation. To see an example, have a look at my archives page.

13. Site Accessibility

Another fundamental yet often neglected factor that might affect your site ranking is the issue of accessibility. Often your site may be unaccessible due to broken links and wrong use of robots.txt that may cause your pages not indexed by Search Engines.

The solution: Broken Link Checker for WordPress will check and detect both internal and outbound links that don’t work and notifies you on the Dashboard of any broken links.

14. Keywords in First Paragraph

Put simply, search engines scan and expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the article. Make sure your keywords appear in the first paragraph of your content. If you do notice, in the first paragraph of this article, I place two primary keywords, SEO and blogging as part of my keyword optimization.

15. Keywords in Footer

Well, the first impression and the last impression usually makes the most remembered impression. A simple SEO trick of placing a link to your main page with your keyword as an anchor text could have a positive result in your search engine ranking.

Final Say

SEO is never intended to be a one-time effort. No success can be achieved overnight. It takes a lot of patience, commitment and the know-hows to succeed. All the above tips when applied may not push you into #1 but it will surely bring you one step closer to #1.

The key to SEO success is persuading search engines that your site is relevant in any search query. There are no hard and fast rules to SEO, it all boils down to the right mixture of quality content and quality inbound and outbound links with proper keywords optimization.

Good luck with your SEO. If you have any opinions or feedbacks, send them my way. I’m all ears.

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