SEO Tips

Posted by admin on May 9, 2009 under SEO Tips | Read the First Comment

Welcome to the first posting on the Get Me On Top SEO blog.

In this blog I will share with you some very simple SEO techniques that will help drive traffic to your website.  A lot of the hard work can be done by the webmasters / web developers before you need to consider looking to professional SEO consultants to help drive traffic to your website.

Before you go through these tips and before you contact a SEO company make a note of your website rankings for the major search engines.  You can use this as your starting point and gauge how successful these tips are and how successful your SEO company are too.

Validate Your Web Pages

If your web pages are plagued with errors you have no guarantee that search engines can resolve these pages and index the content correctly.  There are heaps of free online markup validators but the industry standard is to use the W3 markup validator.  Go through all of your web pages and validate them against http://validator.w3.org.

Google Local

Google currently has a little less than 70% share of the global search engine market. By creating a Google Local profile, which is free, you will enable your website to be listed at the top of the search page along with a map pinpointing your exact geographical location.

Google Analytics

By setting up Google Analytics, which is free, for your website you will have lots of web site visitor statistics at hand that can be analysed and therefore give you the information to optimise your website further.  Google Analytics gives you information about how the visitor found your website, what they did when they got to your website etc.

Page Title

This may be really obvious to most webmasters out there – but just in case not, I had to include this one.  Ensure that your page titles are descriptive and unique within your website.  Do not have Page Titles duplicated across multiple pages.

Page Description

This is another of those that is pretty obvious to most.  Have a unique Page Description for each page within your website and ensure that it really does describe the contents of the web page.  Page Descriptions are often displayed in the Search Engine results beneath the Page Title – so make sure its punchy and concise.

Headers

Header Tags, H1, H2, H3 … H6, within your web page are extremely important not only for your human visitors but for SEO too.  A really good practice is to ensure the H1 tag contains content very similar to the Page Title and only have one H1 tag per page.

Web Directories

Links to your website are extremely important but not the be all and end all of SEO.  First of all submit your website to DMOZ (Open Directory Project)  and Yahoo directories.  Search Engines value submissions to DMOZ and Yahoo very high because these submissions are checked manually for approval.

Submitting your website to web directories that are specific to the category of your website will be worth more than submitting your website to a directory that is not relevant to your website at all.

Optimise For Keywords

To identify keywords that are relevant to your website try and put yourself in the position of the visitor when using Google.  What do you think they will type into Google and that you hope to appear on the first page for.  Once you have found these keywords you will need to add these keywords to your website by including them in your web page description, page title, header tags, main content etc etc.  But make sure you don’t over do it – if these keywords appear too often then Google will think the site is false and lower your ranking.  If they are used too little then Google will think your website is not important enough for these keywords.  Its a very tricky and complicated task and there are SEO tools that can help you with this.

Professional SEO

By going through each of the steps above will not only improve the quality of your website, possibily improve your website rankings and raise awareness of your website but it will also leave only in good stead for if / when you bring in professional SEO help as they would only go through each of these steps and charge you for it anyway.

But obviously there will be areas of SEO that we cannot add to this list and will mean that you will need to hire an SEO consultant.  SEO Copywriting is a prime example.  SEO Copywriting is a skill that we cannot explain easily in this blog but we all know we need it for effective SEO.  The content of your web page is vitally important for human visitors and SEO but to author such content takes an awful lot of planning and studying of the business.  So choose your SEO company very carefully and enquire about such skills and experience – don’t just believe what their home page says – check it out!!!

Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, Google Local, Keywords, Semantic HTML, SEO, Tips