Timeless Techniques for Developing Human Friendly and Search Engine Optimized Websites

By making your site human friendly and search engine optimized, you can drive organic traffic for free. You don't have to spend a fortune in time and money to learn and apply simple search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

Though most of the SEO techniques are as old as the web and they will remain timeless in the future, lots of people still wonder what is SEO and how they are going to implement it in their web site. By following the steps described in this article, you will be able easily incorporate the most important SEO techniques in your site.

1. Know what people are searching. Before you rush to develop your site, you need to do some keyword research. You don't have to buy any tool. Use the Google Adwords keyword tool. It is free. Let's say that you want a website to sell oranges. And the thing that differentiates your business from thousands selling oranges online is the freshness of your product.

Using the Google Adwords keyword tool, you search "fresh orange" to obtain approximately 50 key phrases that are related to fresh orange. For example, a few of these key phrases are: "fresh orange", "fresh orange juice", "fresh orange cake", "fresh orange juice recipe", "fresh orange chocolate", etc.

These keywords are what people are searching in the Google search engine. Your site should effectively use these key phrases to improve your search engine rankings. The list will help you guide in your SEO efforts.

2. Every body has a title so also a web page. You can see it in the browser's top left hand corner. In the HTML language, the language used to write web pages, this is called a title tag. Your home page should have a title that is short but descriptive enough to convey what your site is all about. Don't use the same title for all your pages. Use different titles for different pages to describe what the pages are about.

Use keywords in your title that makes sense to human reader. Don't stuff keywords hoping that search engines will love your pages. Search engines are becoming smarter and soon they will figure out that your site is designed for ranking higher in search engines rather than informing your visitors about your site's contents.

Using the keyword list you have developed earlier, construct an effective sentence for your home page title. For example, your home page title may be: Buy Fresh Orange From Orange Store. Call 1-800-xxx-xxx.

3. Meta is all about a web page. The second element of SEO is the meta tags. Though there are lots of debates about the effectiveness of meta tags in SEO, Google still uses the meta description of your site in the result pages. Put your unique selling point in your meta description. For your orange store, you may say: Guaranteed fresh orange shipped to your door. Price starting at $2 per pound. Free shipping on orders of $100 or more. Call 1-800-xxx-xxx.

4. Contents need headers, emphasis and links. Use one top level header (H1) tag in the very beginning of your page. Use your keyword in the header tag. Separate different sections of the page using H2 and H3 tags. Use key words in those sub-titles. Emphasis key words using bold element in paragraphs. Don't over do it, otherwise it will look like you are trying to game the search engine for higher rankings.

From your home page contents, link to other pages using keywords in the anchor texts. If you have a page that describes how to prepare fresh orange cake, use the phrase in your anchor texts. The keyword list that you have created during the keyword research phase will give you ideas for creating contents that use those popular and longtail keywords.

5. Images should speak. Use images related to your products. You can use flickr images for free. However, use only the images that are released under creative common license. When you search in flickr, go to advanced search and narrow your results to images that you can use for commercial sites under creative common license. Creative common license requires you to acknowledge the source. If you acknowledge the source using active links, use a nofollow tag in the anchor tag.

Give some meaningful names to your image files. Here again, the keyword list created earlier will help you. Use the alt and title attributes in the image tag. The alt attribute should be short and it should use an appropriate keyword from your keyword list. Title attributes show the tool tips when a user moves the mouse over the image. Use the title tag to completely describe the image and use only one keyword in the title tag.

Though the basic search engine optimization techniques are not difficult to master, many websites skip this important step in their zeal to develop a web presence as quickly as possible. You will reap organic traffic benefits by knowing these simple timeless techniques and implementing them in the initial stage of website development.