SEO Tips - Search Engine Optimization in a nutshell

As there is ALOT of info on DP about SEO, I thought that a lot of people might benefit from some basic tips! Here they are below, and feel free to add your own ideas...

• Select 5 keyword phrases that describe the products or services that you sell. Try to be quite specific, because the less general you are, the less competition you will have for those particular words. Also, when your phrases are specific, you will be able to source some very highly-targeted traffic to your website.
  
  As an example, a business selling t-shirts with crazy dog cartoons on them should select such phrases as: ‘funny dog t-shirts’, ‘humorous dog t-shirts’, ‘t-shirts with dogs on them’, and ‘dog cartoon t-shirts’. Make sure that you don’t try to optimize for overly-broad phrases, like ‘t-shirts’, in this case. Although it seems logical to go after the millions of people searching ‘t-shirts’ in Google every day, that would be a very difficult task without paying out a lot of money. There would be an extreme amount of competition, and only a very small percentage of people searching for ‘t-shirts’ would be interested in ‘funny dog t-shirts’ anyway.

• Once you have selected your 5 keyword phrases, insert them into your website page HTML titles. Use your most important phrase at the beginning, followed by the other 4 keyword phrases and then your business/brand name. Also remember keyword variations, these would be phrases like ‘tees’, ‘tee shirts’, ‘t/shirts’ and ‘t shirts’ in our example.

• For your H1 header tag within the page HTML, make sure that you contain the same keywords that are in your title.

• Also use descriptive sub-headers (H2 or H3) with your keywords in them before every few paragraphs. This improves usability and helps the search engines to know what the page is about.

• Use bullets, italics <em> and bolding <strong> for your keywords to break up your site content and make it easier to read.

• Write your website copy for humans. Make sure you don’t overuse your keywords just to get high search rankings. Search engines don’t like pages that look ‘spammy’, so make sure you write naturally.

• Add lots of quality on-site content. Forums, blogs and articles are all good things to have on your website as they constantly add natural text to your site containing several good keywords related to your types of products or services. The more pages of human generated content that your site has, the more chance you site has of pages appearing in the search results. This will also get you links from other sites, as people will begin to find your content useful.

IMPORTANT: Link Building

Once you’ve properly optimized your website pages, you can start looking at the most important part of SEO - link building. By finding ways to get other quality and relevant websites to link to yours, you can boost your search engine ranking by hundreds of positions at a time.

• Find websites that are closely related to yours (same keywords), and email them asking them to link to your home page in return for placing a link on your website to their home page.

• Whenever you can, try to make sure that your keywords are in the link text of any links pointing to your pages.

• Look for places where you can get free, high-quality links to your website like local business directories, website directories and any kind of industry directories.

• Write relevant, keyword rich articles about your industry with a link to your site and submit them to several article directories.

• Comment on other sites like blogs and forums with useful, relevant and helpful information and include a keyword rich link to your site in the signature or at the end of the comment.

• Issue online press releases about your business with links to your site. Sponsor charities, blogs, or other websites related to yours in exchange for links.

• Link to your site from your MySpace or Facebook page, or any other similar sites.

• If you have any interesting articles, pictures, videos forum or blog posts on your website, submit them to social bookmarking sites like Digg.com with your main keywords in the headline.

Each of these tips will go a long way towards helping you to get higher search engine rankings, so they are well worth your effort. Note that many quality links into your site will boost your rankings dramatically, so be sure to spend some time on link building. It’s also worth mentioning that any new SEO changes to your website can take up to 30 days (and sometimes longer) to have any effect on your search engine ranking - so remember to be patient!

Hope this helps a few people!

 

good post. A very informative summary.

 

thanks for this really great info dear.

 

thanks for the great post.

 

Great post H-bomb. The Title tag is the most important aspect.

 

Great Post thanks for sharing....

 

Great information. I really appreciate the effort you put into this post and the quality of the information.

 

nice tips thanks

 

Great tip with the link building.
I did alot link building from .edu and .gov
Really did boost my PR and exposure even with just 2 or 3 of em.

 

romico, for sure!

Links from .edu and .gov sites are especially powerful! What is your method of getting .edu and .gov links?

 

good post , i have a query to ask

Does anyone know how it usually takes for the change to on the website to take effect in search engines?

The reason I'm asking is because a week ago I made a ground breaking change on the website (moved from one CMS to another, much more SEO friendly) and so far I haven't seen any change in the search engine generated entries. The old URL's are being redirected to matching content on the new CMS, might that be a reason to not have them re-indexed straight away?

Does the change dynamic depend on the search engine? Does it take longer for website with plenty of pages to get re-indexed? I'm guessing that the answer to the question is yes, but I hope someone will have more specific info.

Thanks!

 

Digg is probably stopped for new users. we need to little more social bookmarking too

 

Thanks for the compliment, dsouza. To answer your question, there is no set interval at which your site will be crawled.

With Google, they will generally crawl sites that are updated frequently at more regular intervals than static sites. A good example of this is with a news site that has new content every few hours. Because Google wants to stay up to date they will re-index these types of sites daily or even hourly.

The crawlers are constantly following the links on pages to other sites to find new content, but they may not revisit your site for up to a month at a time.

 

Great Tips

Thanks For sharing Tips

 

Hi,
there is not a specific time that search engine did change in the listing or updates. there are some of the factor which affect on crawl rate for your website. like to add new and fresh content, get thematic back links, increase link popularity and many more.
based on above factor web crawler increase visiting frequency to your website and update changes accordingly.

you can also handle if from google webmaster tool by submitting sitemap.

feel free to ask question if you are having any query.

 

good que?

The ans of your que might have come in affirmative. But, for that you have to spend lot of money and one dedicated person who always find innovative ideas to promote your business as well as to boost your search engine rankings.
There is no any guarantee to get high rankings but effort never be failure.

 

Agreed, but there are certainly ways to dramatically increase your chances of getting good rankings. It's all about having an idea of how the search engines work.

 

This post is very useful, relevant and helpful for myself.

 

This is exactly right, the more frequent your content, the more the crawlers will visit your site. Also the crawlers will follow any new links that you get from other sites straight to yours and update your search engine listing when they do.

 

A very good post. this is really helpful.