Top 10 Tips to Improve your SEO Skills
 SEO,
or search engine optimization, is the means of being able to improve your
website so that search engines will like you better, this ultimately gives you
higher ranks in search engines. Since I starting marketing online a few years
ago I was pretty unskilled in this area, but over time I started to get the
picture of what search engines like to see in a site. I also learned a lot
by reading eBooks about SEO, as well as 10+ years of experience working on
multiple websites. If you are completely new to SEO,
then you can click here to read
why SEO is
so important.
So if you had to learn the basics to get
started to become an SEO expert (although it may take awhile to actually become
an expert), then here are some basic, yet very important SEO tactics you and every
serious webmaster should know about:
1) Unique Content - The more unique your content is, the better.
Search engines (especially Google) want to see content that is unique, and not
duplicate content that is found on other websites. I have learned the hard
way that
duplicate content
simply does not work. So learn from someone that actually tried to use
duplicate content and failed, and stick to unique content!
How do you check and see if content is unique? There are 2 methods I
personally use and recommend:
- Copyscape.com
- Simply copy and paste a phrase from your article in quotes into a Google search
and see if it finds any results.
2) Useful Great Content - Your content
should also be very useful
for people. Having really good content means
that people will naturally want to share your content with others, which is the
secret to getting massive amounts of traffic from search engines as people will
be naturally linking to you everywhere. Getting links to your site is the
next important step in improving SEO. But this can naturally happen for
you if your content is great. However, most new websites will have to be
jump started regardless by getting links yourself, which can be a tedious
process.
3) Obtaining Backlinks From
Other Sites - This is probably one of the
most important aspects of getting a highly ranked website on search engines, and
it can
take a lot of work as well. A backlink is simply a link on a site (other than yours)
that points to your site. Search engine robots crawl the internet through links,
and that is how your site gets indexed in the first place! The more incoming
links you have to your site, the better ranking you will get. Also, not every
link is considered equal. Links from similar sites are important, also the PageRank
of the site that points to yours is important as well. So learn everything
you can about
page rank
and link building.
 4) Title Tags - A Title Tag is simply the
<title></title> tag at the top of an html file that indicates what the
title of a page is. This is very important because this will become the
search result link you see when you do a search on a search engine (such as
Google pictured on the right).
This is obviously important for ranking pages higher with certain keywords.
So take your time with each Title you write out, as it can dramatically effect
the traffic you get to that page overtime! You can help yourself come up
with titles by using
Google's
Keyword Tool, that will help you come up with highly searched phrases that
people search for at Google. You can use those phrases to help you come up
with titles that will give you insane search engine traffic. Just
remember, you still want to use titles that describe your pages clearly to
humans. You want visitors to read content that your title is referring to,
otherwise they will leave immediately and look elsewhere.
5) Keep Things Basic - With the recent Panda and Penguin
updates, Google is looking for sites that have fewer ads and clutter. So keep things as simple as possible. I
found that sites that have a lot of "stuff" going on, tend to do no better than very basic sites
that just have the SEO foundation down. Try to keep your HTML tags as few as
possible by using proper CSS with simple templates. Keep your content (text, images,
and videos) as your key focus in a site. A lot of people can get
turned off going to a site that has a bunch of links scattered everywhere, bunch
of ad units, and tables upon tables of nonsense, etc. This stuff just confuses the web surfer and they will most likely
leave.
6)
Internal Link Structure - The link structure of your site is very
important, especially if you are trying to get all the pages of your site well
indexed in search engines. Internal linking simply means linking to another page
of your website within an article on your site. There is actually a few above on
this article here for example of what I mean. Here is a chart that describes
how it generally works:
Internal linking improves the ranking of your pages via the anchor texts used
for the internal links. Anchor text is the text that resembles the URL for
the link you are clicking on. These keywords will then get ranked higher
for those pages you are linking to.
7) Use of the Header Tags - This is something not very many people consider or
even think about, but the use of Header tags, specifically the <H1></H1> tag is
very important and should be on every page of your site (generally for the
title, before the article). This indicates what the main focus of that
page is about, so it gives search engines a better
understanding where to rank that page in search results. Although there is
<H2></H2> tags and h3, h4, etc.., they are not nearly as important as the
<H1>
tag. I do recommend using h2 tags, but they are not necessary. By
simply
bolding other headers in your articles, I think those are just as
good as <h2> - <h9> tags.
Other useful things you can use throughout your content include bullets,
sizing of fonts, images, tables, etc. Just try to make things look good so
humans will appreciate your content better, that way they have a better chance of sharing your
content with
someone else. Remember, word of mouth advertising is the key to any
successful business!
8) Keywords Throughout Your
Content -
It's important to
understand that in order to get ranked higher for certain keywords, to simply
make sure you have those keywords in your content. You will be surprised
to see how many people fail to do this. Make sure you have the proper
keywords in your content so more people searching for things can find you.
9) Keywords In Images -
Did you know you can
get more search engine traffic simply by making sure your images are using an
ALT tag for text?
It's true. Google images scans these texts and that will allow you to get more
traffic from the Google image search. This also helps for getting regular
web search traffic as well.
10) Learn from others - I will finish this article up
by saying that you can learn a lot of SEO advice
from watching what other people do, and reading in-depth eBooks on the subject. That is where I have
personally learned most of my knowledge of SEO. I do not consider myself an
expert in this field, but gurus like Brad Callen (you can check out his famous SEO ebook here), and
many others have plenty of valuable SEO advice that you can learn from.
Conclusion
These ten tips are probably the most important tips you should know about SEO.
There are literally hundreds of more tips on this subject with new strategies
developing every day. Search Engine Optimization is extremely important to know and understand if your
goal is to bring in massive amounts of free search engine traffic to your site. So I would learn everything you can about it
from all different sources. There is a
gold mine on the
internet to be tapped into and learning SEO will drastically improve your
chances of getting your hands on some of that gold.
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