Quick And Easy SEO Tips

This was posted on 04/30/2011 and was filed in Guides and Information, Blogging | (No Comments Yet)

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization has become the art of getting high Google rankings. It can be time consuming, but after becoming experienced enough to really know what you are doing, you can increase your rankings with only an hour or two of work a week. Here are afew quick and easy tips to aid you when gearing or simply preparing your site for future SEO work. I tend to follow these principles when designing any site - whether or not I'm gearing it for SEO.

Use Keyword-Based Filenames

IF you are going to be linking to different pages around your site, name your files in ways that represents what the page is about. For example, if you have a page about seo tools, name your page something similar to useful_seo_tools.php. This adds on to the keyword relevancy of your page, thus increasing your pagerank. Popular CMS systems such as WordPress allow you to change link structures when creating pages and news posts.

Try To Avoid Dynamic Pages With Query Strings

Many PHP applications will use query strings to pass data ( news.php?post=44535, for example ). While this works fine for the general use to go to, search engines tend to avoid these and will crawl slower over the pages. If you can, try to use something to turn these into real pagenames. mod_rewrite tricks allow you to dynamically create fake pages for links like this, so you can have /news/my_news_post/ link over to news.php?id=455.

Use Your Title Tag!

Your title tag is one of the first thing Search Engines will look at during user searches. Toss your keywords in here if you can, but keep it RELEVANT to your page content. The title for this page is Free and Easy SEO Tricks And Tips and the page briefly gives a few SEO tricks and tips for Web Campaigns.

Use Header Tags

Our ever popular header tags ( <h1>,<h2,etc. ) are INCREDIBLY useful to us. They tell search engines when a new section comes up and what that section should be about. Never use more than one <h1> per page, and try to limit your use of <h2> tags.

Google Could Care Less About META Tags

Many web developers and designers are use to tossing their keywords and page content up in META tags at the top of the page, but in reality Google and other search engines tend to completely ignore these. They are starting to look at your actual page content and not just the tags you have at the top of the page. It is useful to have them up there, but Search Engines are more worried about your actual page content. This page has no META tags, but you're here anyway, right?

Use ALT Tags With Images

When inserting an image, use ALT tags to tell Search Engines ( and people ) what those images are. You can even utilize these to your advantage and toss some keyword-rich text inside. Search Engines like to see images and REALLY like to see images that are related to your page content.

Link To And From Relevant Web Pages

This applies to pages on your website and pages on other websites. If you have a site about SEO Tricks and another site about SEO Campaigns, it will help you immensely to link them back and fourth to each other. Relevant sites linking together will get higher search rankings.

Switch Up Content When You Can

If A Search Engine sees that your site is highly active, it will place you higher up in search results? Why - IT shows that your site is more dynamic and that somebody is still using it. Mots people will build a site and toss it up without touching it for months - this leads to old information. Quick weekly updates will do wonders for your rankings and dynamic, changing content is great as well.

Use Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics to track page views and user search terms. Analytics is easy to install on your site and was created by google to help you manage your site. It tracks how many users your site gets and where they are coming from - including which search terms they enter into google to get there.

Know Your Audience

Know your audience and where they come from. If you target keywords that your select audience is using you are bound to get more traffic. For example, if you are targeting "seo tips" and your client market is searching for "seo tricks", you'll be out a lot of targeted traffic. There are many tools out there, such as the google keywords tool to help you out with knowing just what your audience is searching for. Use a program like Analytics (mentioned above) to help you with this as well.

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