SEO TIPS AND TRICKS

12 Most Important SEO Tips

Google search algorithm changes all the time and there are hundreds of different techniques to achieve higher ranking in the search results, but these basic fundamental SEO Tips have not changed for a long time now and every webmaster should implement them to achieve better Search Rankings.

Some like to refer to it as Google Optimization and I think it is simply because of a small difference in how Google, Yahoo or MSN rank websites in their search results but Google is #1 Search engine today and many other engines use Google index for their search results. Regardless these tips will work for all engines. Free tips below are not in any particular order of importance as they are all crucial factors in Optimizing your site for Top rankings.

Here are Top 8 most important Free SEO Tips that anyone can give you:

SEO TIP #1, FIND RELATED KEYWORDS

Before you even build your website you need to determine what niche or theme your website is about. Same with any other page, there’s going to be main topic for it. Once you decide on topic, you need to find keywords and phrases that relate to your theme, analyze them and pick most relevant ones but they also should be keywords in demand. It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that nobody is even searching for. How do you find in demand keywords? The most popular resources areWordTracker, KeywordCountry and KeywordElite. Using these tools you will be able to narrow your keywords to ones that have the highest search volume and not that many websites to compete against which is known as Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI).

(Watch these free Website Marketing Video Tutorials.)

SEO TIP #2, ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITION

Website linking structure and number of links pointing to your site or page is crucial to ranking High in Google and if you rank good in Google, chances are you’ll probably do good in Yahoo and other search engines but top 3 search engines that will bring most traffic are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Analyzing your competitors is important and included in Free SEO tips because search engines do analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria which is called Page Rank (PR).

So what other websites are doing to rank on top of search results. In order to find out you need to gather a significant amount of data about the top ranking sites for whatever keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize your page for, like:

1. Competitions rank in the Search Engines Results for given keyword
2. The number of incoming links to the site home page, not including internal links.
3. What keywords they use in the title tag
4. Number of links containing keywords in the link text
5. PageRank of linking pages
6. The Alexa traffic ranking

Most of this information can be collected free by querying Google and Yahoo (Read about it in thisAnalyzing Individual Keyword Phrase article) and using free seo tools but it is very time consuming and you can’t get all data in one place.

I use This SEO Tool that can easily crawl a Web site and compile statistics on keyword usage throughout the site with single click of a mouse and all data is displayed in one window.

SEO TIP #3, TITLE OPTIMIZATION

Many SEO professionals still argue over this but the page title tag element is still one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines.

The title tag is displayed as the first line of text in the blue row at the top of any browsing window. Search Engine Friendly title tag is ideally 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length, straight and to the point, this is what will show up in search engine results as a link to your page. Have at least one main keyword in title tag but don’t stuff all of your keywords in it. SEO Tip: make sure your Page Title Tag is relevant to the content on the page and EVERY page should have it’s own Title tag.
(Read more and see title tag examples in this Meta tags article.)

SEO TIP #4, META TAGS OPTIMIZATION

META tags are hidden code of information in the head area of your web pages and is used to communicate with search engine spiders/crawlers. The most important META tags you need to utilize in your webpages are:

1. Description
2. Keywords
3. Robots

I personally don’t believe that sequencing of these tags in certain order is that important. Even though I see many websites put title tag after description and keywords tags lately but there is no proof that it is better for SEO.

Optimization of Description Meta tags

The effective META description tag consists of 25 to 30 words or less but using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces) or some Search Engines would not consider it Search Engine Friendly.
Read more and see meta tags examples in this Meta tags article.

Optimization of Keywords Meta tags

The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself but don’t fret too much over your Keywords Meta tag, instead utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your Title Tag element, Description Meta Tag, heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Optimal Keyword Meta Tag has 15 to 20 words max.SEO Tip: Don’t repeat your keywords more than 3 times or search engine will consider it as spam of their search results and don’t include keywords that are not in the main content section of your page.
(Read more and see keywords tag examples in this Meta tags article.)

Robots Meta tag will let search engine know if you want a particular page to be or NOT be indexed or to follow or not to follow links on given page. (Read more and see robots tag examples in this Robots txtarticle.)

SEO TIP #5, OPTIMIZE PAGES WITH HEADINGS

Header tags will tell the search engine what words are important in the context of your page. Using <h1>,<h2>,<h3>, etc.. tags is the best way to highlight important keywords. With that in mind consider using keywords relevant to the page content (theme) in your Header Tags. The best practice is to place your primary keyword in your <h1> tags and your secondary keyword into the <h2> tags.

You can think of an <h1> header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page and you should have ONLY ONE (1) h1 tag on any page.

h2 and h3 header tags should be thought of as a sub headings for your page. You should place your 2nd most important keyword in the <h2> header tag. The <h2> tag should be placed somewhere towards the top half of your webpage, in any case below <h1> tag.
(Read more and see header tag examples in this article about Header tags.)

SEO TIP #6, USE DEEP LINKING AND ANCHOR TEXT

When you exchange links or submit your website to directories you want to link to as many pages on your site as possible as this will tell search engines that you have a lot of good and worthwhile content. If you have all links pointing to your homepage it will tell search engine that your site is very shallow and they might think that the links were created with some automation software instead of naturally (organic).

Use keywords in Anchor text of your links but you definitely don’t want all your incoming links to look the same, because that also looks like automation and you might get red flagged by Google. SEO Tip: Use your website URL sometimes, your company name other times and different but related keywords in anchor text of inbound links.

Getting as many as possible inbound links have become #1 priority in SEO world as that will get your website higher Page Rank and therefore higher rankings in Search results. There are different links you can acquire: Reciprocal and One Way links. One way links are by far better and much harder to get but any link you can get to point to your website is better than none. To get free one way links I use Free tools likeDirectory submitter and Article Submitter .

(Learn more about different types of links in this article: One Way Links, Reciprocal or both?)

SEO TIP #7, CREATE SITE MAP AND GOOGLE XML MAP

Every website needs a Sitemap big or small. Sitemap should be linked to from every page on your site. A site map will help users and search engine robots find all the important pages on your site with just two clicks. This is especially helpful if your site has a hard-to-crawl navigation menu like java script or images based navigation. For WordPress blogs I recommend downloading this free sitemap generator plugin. You can see example on my sitemap page.

Smaller sites can use second navigation bar in the footer that will act as a small mini site map. This is nothing more than all your important pages as links in the footer.

By submitting a XML Sitemap to a search engine, you are making easier for that engine crawlers to crawl and index pages of your site. As Google describes it in this article

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can’t reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface.

For regular websites there are many free online xml sitemap generators, just Google it but for your WordPress blog you can use this free Google XML sitemap generator plugin as it will also create Robots.txt file which is the next Free SEO Tip.

SEO TIP #8, CREATE ROBOTS.TXT FILE

The robots.txt file will instruct search engine robots what pages and/or folders on your blog or website should be or should NOT be crawled and indexed. Most Content Management Software (WordPress, Joomla, etc.) will have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) and you really don’t want them to crawl them because there is no relevant content on them so creating a simple robots.txt file can actually improve your website crawlability and therefore rankings and organic traffic.
(Learn more and see robots.txt examples in this article about Robots.txt file.)

There are many more valuable SEO Tips that you need to use when building a website or creating pages and you can read the rest of the Tips on next page: Other Free SEO Tips.

SEO TIP #9, OPTIMIZING WITH ALT TEXT

Alt text is the line of text you see pop up when you place your cursor over an image. It also displays a text representation of the image when the user has images turned off in their browser.

Since it is indexed by the search engines, the alt text attribute can help your SEO but should not to be stuffed with keywords or phrases. The alt text should reflect the content of the image that is again relevant to the page content. (Learn more and see examples in this article about Using Alt Text.)

SEO TIP #10, USE SEO-FRIENDLY URLS

If your website is run by CMS, you should always enable the SEO friendly Url structure. For example WordPress by default uses numeric permalinks (?p=123) which displays url like www.yourdomain.com/?p=123. You should change your permalinks to this custom option: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/(This will return this url : www.yourdomain.com/2007/12/24/post-title) or just /%postname%/(This will return this url : www.yourdomain.com/post-title) and enable the customizable permalinks. This is a search-engine friendly URL that’s commonly used.

Either way you should try to use keywords in url’s and file names and always use hyphens instead underscores. (for example: www.yourdomain.com/seo-tips.html ) (Related article: Dashes or Underscores in URL? )

SEO TIP #11, SOCIAL BOOKMARKING AND MARKETING

Join the appropriate online social communities like StumbleUpon or MyblogLog and become an active, contributing member of the sites. Also adding a AddThis button on your website will give your visitors to bookmark and add your pages to many social networks.
( Read more in this article: Free Traffic from Social Bookmarking )

SEO TIP #12, ARTICLE MARKETING

Article Marketing is still one of the greatest techniques that can be used to achieve FREE search engine rankings, PR and traffic (and make affiliate sales). 
( Read more in this article: New Boom Marketing )

This Free SEO tips list could go on and on but I don’t have more time today, I will be adding more tips in the coming weeks and months. Just remember whatever you do in optimizing your site don’t overdo it, write great unique content and build your website and pages for humans in mind, make it readable. You definitely need keywords in your text and meta tags but don’t stuff it.

With this list of Free Seo tips you should be able to develop a good plan for your SEO campaign.

If you know any more Tips that I did not mention here, your additions are welcome in the comments.