1. Good Keyword Research.
Make sure thatbefore you build a site, you figure out exactly what kinds of keywordsyou will want to target. Your site should include keywords that yourprospective clients key into the major search engines. Useful keyword research tools include Wordtracker, Overture, Keyword Discovery and WebCEO.
Anotherfactor to consider is the competition for your keywords. You do notwant to use keywords that your competitors are already competing for.The result being that you will probably not rank well.
Youneed to have keywords that have a high KEI or Keyword EffectivenessIndicator. This is how effective your keywords are in the world ofsearch engines. You do not want to have a keyword phrase that no oneuses, nor do you want to have a keyword that has loads of competition.The KEI is the balance between well used search phrases and lesscompetition.
2. Content is King.
Without great content any thing else is pointless. Users will not return to your site.Users will not stay long on your site. The search engines willdisregard your site, not index it or even ban your site. Writing goodusable applicable content is the number one priority for any SEO or any website for that matter.
Websitesthat are designed for people, offering easy navigation and fresh,unique content will attract search engine spiders that will want toindex the pages.
It is really frustrating when visiting asite looking for up-to-date information, only to find that it hasn’tbeen updated for weeks. You are then forced to get on the phone to findout the information; so what’s the point in having a website?
Websitesthat have not been updated regularly will discourage prospectiveclients and spiders alike. Make sure that your website is constantly updated with fresh, unique content.
3. Build Internal Links
Makesure that you have a high-quality link structure and good navigationon your site, so that not only potential customers, but also searchengine spiders can find and index all the pages on your site.
Acommon mistake is to assume that every visitor will start at your homepage. Most will but it's important to check that each page on your siteis linked to the other pages. This helps the search engine spiders toquickly index your site. Remember that the way you structure your sitenavigation will have an effect on how people judge you and yourbusiness.
4. Building Inbound Links
Gettingother sites to link back to yours is probably the #1 item of importancefor your rankings. If “content is king” then “linking is queen”.Importantly though, is that pages that link to you should be related toyour content. One-way links from sites carry far greater weight thanlinks that are reciprocated.
Links act like votes for your siteand you can't rank well without them. Buying links or beingindiscriminate in the places you link to and places you request linksfrom is no longer considered good practice and could potentially getyour site banned. Quality rather than quantity.
5. Keyword Density
Theamount of times your selected keywords or phrases appear in yourcontent, the relevancy it has in your content and the correct usage ofproper grammatical syntax revolving around those keywords is of primeimportance. The search engines nowadays, derive the importance of aparticular topic from the usage of keywords and their density.
For example, if your site is about programming,but this keyword only appears one in your content, but the wordcomputer appears ten times. Search engines will assume that your siteis about computers rather than programming.
Be careful to notoverdo it. Search engines take a very dim view on too many keywords incontent. This causes it to look un-natural, and is often termed askeyword stuffing.
6. Optimise Your Page Titles
Avery important SEO technique is to include your keywords within theTitle description for each page. It is of prime importance that thetitle tag is unique to the subject matter of each page for the benefitof the search engines.
In other words, each page must have aunique title tag. This will help your search engine rankings as well ashelp users to identify the content of the page.
7. Crawlability Issues
Neverhide your navigation and or content behind Flash, JavaScript, orImages. Always try to use text for search engines to crawl yournavigation. If you absolutely must have a Flash menu or image-basedmenu then the best practice is to create a text-equivalent alternativein the footer of your site. CSS can give your text-based navigationsimilar styling to that of images and the functionality of roll oversimilar to JavaScript menus. Spiders have a hard time crawling Flash,and equally, perhaps even more difficult time with JavaScript, and theycan’t read text that is made from an image.
8. Keyword Emphasis.
Useitalics, bold and underlining to further emphasize your keywords. Thinkof a newspaper and how the bold ,different, bigger titles draw yourattention to the detailed story. Users and Search engines are nodifferent. Usage of Strong and H1 –H6 tags show users and searchengines what is important on your site, and draws their attention toit. It separates the Keywords from the normal text in a visual andsearch engine friendly way.
9. Site maps.
Asite map, in addition to a clear navigation bar and links betweenpages, will help visitors to your website find what they are lookingfor. It will also ensure that search engine spiders visit and indexeach of your pages. Then submit the site map along with the site to thepopular search engines to tell them where you are.
10. Monitor your progress.
Trackyour progress with a web analytics program. use a tool such as “GoogleAnalytics”. It is easy to use, versatile, and it's free. GoogleAnalytics provides a wealth of information to help you further optimiseyour site.
