25 Ways To Improve Your Website’s SEO Strategy
We review 25 easy ways to improve your website’s search engine optimization and increase your natural search engine ranking position (also know as your SERP) without reading spending lots of money! We also get into detail on a few things that you may not know about that you are doing already. Have even more suggestions? Let us know in the comments!
1. CONTENT – well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
2. LINKS – Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
3. TITLE TAGS – Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.
4. NEW CONTENT – Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
5. KEYWORD LINKS – Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
6. GEO SEARCH PHRASES – Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
7. ALT TEXT – Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
8. WWW or NOT – Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
9. INDEX.HTML – Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
10. URL EXTENSIONS – Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
11. SPIDERS – Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
12. BLOG – If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
13. QUALITY LINKS – When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
14. KEYWORD STUFFING – Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work.
15. BLACK LIST SERVER- If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
16. DOMAIN OWNERSHIP – Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
17. BLOG POST TITLE TAGS – When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
18. QUALITY AND UNIQUE Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
19. ONE KEYWORD PER PAGE – Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
20. CALL TO ACTION – SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
21. DAILY JOB – SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
22. PAGE RANK – Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
23. GET SOCIAL Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
24. VIDEO – To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
25. DUPLICATE CONTENT – If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps