11 Tips for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The popularity of a web site gives more profit to a business organization by reaching to more people. The best and probably the cheapest way to reach to more people, is by increasing the listings at search engines. There are different ways to get listed in the top rankings of popular search engines. The following tips help to increase the ranking of a website in main search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing etc.
1. Title and Meta Tags
Most of the search engine’s crawlers first look at the title tag and Meta tag description. Title should contain a keywords which best describe the content of the page. In the Meta tag description also keywords should be included in precise manner. The keywords should be relevant to content of the page. Some of the top search engines like: Google scans the whole page and picks the relevant keywords for indexing.
2. Great and Unique Content
The main thing to attract users to a site is by its content. If the content is not available in other pages and it is of high quality then more people will come into the site and they will stay for longer time.
3. Great Keywords
We can find keywords by using Google Adword keywords that got more hit in the past. This helps in finding out the relevant keywords which can be used in different locations in the website. Firstly, these keywords can be used in Title tag, at description in Meta tag and also inside the body of a web page.
4. Regular updates
Most of the viewers want some new contents in a web site. If the web site is not updated regularly then the viewers will not return back to the web site. In case of crawlers of search engines, they also check for the modified date of the web pages. Therefore the pages that are modified regularly have more probability of being indexed in the search engines.
5. Removing dead links
A great site should not have any blind or dead links which does not result any output. If there are any links inside the website that is not working then that should be removed immediately because those dead links give negative impact to the crawlers when they do not find the pages that are shown in the link.
6. URL with keywords
The best way to get indexed in search engines is to get a domain name with the keyword. If it is not possible then the keywords can be included in URL in a descriptive text, for example: www.xyz.com/best_places_in_sydney.html is more effective then the URL like www.xyz.com/200032.html . This increases the probability of getting caught by the crawlers.
7. Proper use of heading tag
Heading tags shows the importance of the text in a web page to the users, web browsers and search engines. The title of the page should be specified in
tag this gives the idea about the content of the page. Similarly, can be used to break the chunks of information in a web page by specifying the sub-headings.
8. XML sitemap
Sitemap is generally created to give the whole idea about the structure of the web site with links on them. The sitemaps focused for users are not accessed easily by the crawlers of the search engines. Therefore xml sitemaps are used to design the sitemaps mainly focusing for submission to the search engines. Some webmasters prefer separate sitemaps for users and search engines where as some CMS and blog engines generate the sitemaps with style sheet having links on them, which can be used for both the purposes.
9. Link Building
Building links with different sites is one of the best ways for attracting traffic to a site. Exchanging the links with related sites and blogs helps to get more connections resulting in more hits. A lot of sites can be found who accept link exchange. This builds networks which gives more referrals to a site.
10. Social Media
Social networking sites are very helpful in getting better ranking in search engines. Social networking sites like facebook, twitter, stumbleupon, dig, reddit etc are some popular networking websites. These social media give more exposure to the site to different online communities and helps in getting reference.
11. Web directory listings
Web directory listing is a very important thing to be done to uplift a web-site in search engine rankings. The web directories like dmoz.org are very impressive for search engine ranking. There are a lot of free directory listing sites available but they may be bit slow. Therefore we need patience to wait for the effect of all the submission to the web directories.
