Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be an expensive exercise in terms of both time and money if you do not have a definitive plan of what to do and what not to do.
The best SEO strategies involve following white hat SEO techniques and staying away from activities that could adversely affect your search engine rankings or worse, that can get your website banned by Google et al. In this article I'm going to discuss 10 do's of SEO that will keep you on the most appropriate SEO path and improve your search engine rankings.
SEO Tips - 10 Do's Of SEO
1) Thoroughly research potential keywords. The main purpose of organic SEO is to get increase relevant and targetted traffic for all the right keywords. As SEO can take lots of effort, and sometimes money, you should have a clear idea right from the start as to what keywords you want to target. There are many services available, such as WordTracker and Google AdWords Keyword Tool but I recommend you use your own discretion. These tool will enable you to find the most popular pages and just as importantly the pages with the least competition.
2) Target long tail keywords. These keywords have lower volumes of traffic, but in total add up to a sizeable amount of business. These keyphrases will of course have less competition which means you will be able to see results far quicker and with less effort, givingyour SEO campaign an initial boost.
3) Relevant content. Relevant content makes your website information-rich; increases your keyword density; it makes your website link-worthy and fetches you high-value inbound links. Updating your website with new relevant content should form part of any good long term SEO strategy.
4) Unique titles for every page. Titles are used by the search engines to both rank and display pages. Leveraging your page titles will increase your rankings and search engine traffic.
5) Each of your websites pages should have a unique description META tag. Your description meta tag should describe your page in one or two sentences, and of course include your keywords. Like the title your description also appears on the search engine results pages and as searchers often click links after reading the description your page description should obviously be as compelling as possible.
6) Keep the important content near the top. Make sure that the relevant, keyword-rich content stays near the top of your web page.
7) Wherever possible vaild semantic HTML is preferable. Use the heading tags to highlight your main points and ensure that your keywords appear within your heading tags (h1, h3, h3, etc.).
8) Use search engine friendly URLs. Try not to use dynamically generated URLs, instead use search engine friendly URLs .
9) Create a sitemap and keep it up to date. A sitemap should be a separate web page containing links to all your web pages you want indexed by the search engine crawlers.
10) Online directories. Having entries in directories likeYahoo, BOTW and DMOZ! (it's the original directory) can enhance your search engine rankings if your link gets included in them.
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