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One of my designer friends asked me via twitter to write a post about how to get a website on Google’s first page and keep it there.
SEO is very complex and every website is different and needs different approaches of SEO. I will try to keep it simple with the following guidelines:
Research and define your keywords
Before you actually start doing something with the code, make sure that you take your time to define a few keywords you will be targeting for your site. Research a lot and give it thought before you move on. It is crucial that these keywords actually represent the content of your site. Don’t try to fish users with keywords which do not make sense for your site. It will not work and your visitors will not appreciate it!
After you finally decided which keywords you want to concentrate on, you can go over to optimizing your website.
There are many techniques and some of them do not matter for certain search engines but I advise you to implement them anyway. There are actually a few people who still do not use Google.
Visible On Page SEO
Domain name
If it is manageable insert your main keyword in the domain name.
URL
When you create subdirectories or new pages, name them meaningful and insert your keywords. The sooner the keyword is mentioned in the url the better. Here is an example if you would concentrate on the keyword “marketing”:
bad: http:/www.companyname.com/services/
good: http:/www.companyname.com/internet-software-for-marketing/
best: http:/www.companyname.com/marketing-internet-software/
Page Title
Make the page title simple, meaningful and try to insert as many of your keywords as you can. It also matters which words you write first. So try to place your keyword in the beginning of the title.
Do also write unique page titles for every single page!
Heading tags
Use h1, h2, and h3 tags on your site. Make them unique and insert your keywords. Like before, it does matter where the keyword stands. The sooner the better.
Bold text tags
When writing the content use bold text on your keywords!
Other places to use your keywords
Besides the already mentioned places like page title, headings and content you can should put your keywords into site navigational areas (links) and alt tags in pictures.
Non-visible Page SEO
robots.txt & sitemaps
Create a robots.txt and a sitemap for your site!
For further details check these two links: post from Google about robots.txt
and this about sitemaps.
OFF Page SEO
Inbound Links
Get inbound links. The more the better. But wait, do not go crazy and backlink spam! Go for one-way back links from relevant and quality websites. This will boost your Google page rank.
Link Anchor Text
Use short and significant anchor texts for back links. So for example instead of having the link saying “YourCompanyName” try to make it specific like “Internet Marketing”.
More SEO tips - The do’s and do not’s
- Do not target common keywords like “shop” or “design”
- Do not copy any content from other pages
- Add new content from time to time to keep your site on top
- Monitor and analyze your keywords performance and study your competitor
- Try to avoid flash and scripts to keep your code clean
- Use not more than 5 to 7 words for your meta keywords
- Use unique and relevant meta keywords for every single page
- Create landing pages, optimized for specific keywords
- Don’t spam your meta tags with keywords, focus on your main keywords
- Provide unique and useful content. Seriously, this is crucial!
- Use text for your navigation and not images
- Integrate a blog for fresh content and social marketing possibilities
- Once again, take your time researching the right keywords for your site
Resources
Here are a few resources I highly recommend you to get more into detail with SEO:
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Google Webmaster Tools
SEO Forum
SEO 101 podcast
SEO Tweeters Directory at justtweetit.com
Ezine Articles about SEO
If you have any questions you can find me on twitter at twitter.com/soul_star
5 Comments
Super post, clearly laid out.
Not too specific, which is impossible to do in a post about SEO anyway, but the pointers are the most important thing.
Great stuff
Graham
ImJustCreative’s last blog post..Twitter WMA Part 1 - (Weapon of Mass Addiction)
Hi Simon!
Great post. I would like to add something that I’ve noticed.
The Google Webmaster tool warned me a couple of times that the Google robot found some duplicate content on my site/blog. I had the same description meta tag for each and every page. Big mistake. While the number of pages was low, it wasn’t a big deal. Soon as the number of pages started to increase, those description was duplicated with each new page. Google punished me, it didn’t took him much time. After I changed the description tag, I was rising up again.
Another thing is that, when Google starts to see 2 page title as different. For example, again learned from warnings from the Webmaster Central, is that the “php tagged posts” is not different from “framework tagged posts” for Google. Apparently, one has to change more than just a word so that Google see it as unique content. An experiment would be interesting on this topic.
I feel that the quality of the inbound links is in top 5 things that matters for Google, or even in top 3. Soon as I got some quality link backs from PHPDeveloper.org and similar sites, my site got some major traffic through Google.
Cheers mate!
Robert :)
Robert’s last blog post..Powered by WordPress 2.7 beta 1
Thank you very much for your comments, Graham and Robert!
This really is just a basic guideline, touching on SEO.
About the problem with the duplicate content in WordPress you also could use this plugin:
http://www.seologs.com/wordpress/wordpress-duplicate-content-cure/
And also check this detailed post at seoresearcher.com
http://www.seoresearcher.com/how-to-make-your-wordpress-blog-duplicate-content-safe.htm
A good summary of the basics, thanks for the post.
Aaaaargh… my eyes… they burn!!!! the color!!!!!!!!!!
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