Enhance Your Site’s Usability and Improve SEO with a Site Map
Create a site map – A site map is a separate HTML page that acts as a directory of the pages on your website. Each page listed in the site map is hyperlinked.
Use keywords in the link anchor text and consider synonyms that might be commonly used in place of your keywords, such as plates for dishes. Also, since search engines seem to place more weight on text contained in a bulleted or numbered list, put your links in lists.
A site map is not only good for getting search engine spiders to follow your page links and easily crawl your entire site, it’s a useful tool for your visitors because it helps them find the content page they’re looking for. It may also help them click into pages they might have otherwise overlooked.
Anchor Hyperlinks with Keywords
Use keyword text in your links – The text used to anchor a link is important and needs to be keyword related whenever possible.
For example, link the text hand painted china to your hand-painted china page, do not use click here. No one searching for hand-painted china is likely to search for “click here”.
High Quality Inbound Links Can Boost Your Rankings and Site Traffic
Secure incoming links – Most website owners engage in reciprocal linking strategies – agreeing to exchange links with other sites. While this is helpful if you reciprocate with related, high-value websites, it is not nearly as effective as securing one-way links coming in to your site.
Getting a listing in a legitimate and frequently consulted web directory is valuable, even if you have to pay for the listing. The most trusted free directory on the web is DMOZ. The downside to DMOZ is that getting a listing will take some time – even 18 months or so in some cases. Additionally, you need to be careful to request the listing for the correct category for your website. If you don’t, you won’t get your listing.
Keyword Description Text Boosts SEO and Compels Searchers to Click
Make keywords part of a compelling description – Within the HTML code of your web page you want to include a Description tag. A description tag looks like this:
<META Name=”Description” Content=”Hand-painted china you’ll love at discounted prices. Hand Painted Creations features a fabulous collection of hand painted china, including dishes, tea cups, mugs and much, much more.”>
The content of a Description META tag is used by some, but not all, search engines in the search engine results page to describe the content of your page.
If the search engine your website visitor uses to find sites that use your keywords displays the contents of your Description tag, you want the searcher to be compelled to click the link to your site. Ranking number one doesn’t mean your link will get clicked.
Provide Plenty of Keyword-Focused Content on Your Website
Create useful keyword content – often – The saying “content is king” is true. The actual content on your site has everything to do with your search rankings.
New content should focus on your targeted keywords whenever possible. Repeat your keywords and related words in your text, but don’t overdo it to the extent where your content looks like spam, is grammatically incorrect or doesn’t serve its purpose.
The more often you update your content, the more the search engines will spider your site – walk through your content to see what it contains. The more content you create, the more likely you are to get noticed and opportunities to cross link to other keyword focused content are also increased, which helps improve the rankings for the content you’re linking to.
Making the Most Use of Your Targeted Keywords
Use keyword text, not images for your site’s navigation
This SEO technique gets your primary keywords on every page of your web site. The link leads to the page you are targeting for that keyword or phrase.
In the old days it was common to use image maps with hyperlinked hot spots for website navigation. Image maps are counterproductive when it comes to search engine optimization. It is still common to use images, such as buttons for website navigation. This too, is counterproductive because it doesn’t allow you to take best advantage of your keywords. While you can insert your keywords into the image’s ALT tag, linked text carries greater weight in the algorithms search engines use for rankings.
Search Engines Weigh Your Titles Heavily
Use your keywords in your page titles – What you place between <title> and </title> in the HTML for your web page is critical. Use your keywords, avoid prepositions and conjunctions where possible (the, and, for, with, etc.) and watch your punctuation within the title. Using only dashes between phrases in a title seems to help.
For example, Hand Painted China – Dishes – Mugs. It is not necessary and usually not advisable to waste space in your page’s title tag with your company’s name. If you do, put it at the end of the title – you want your keywords up front.
How You Name Your Website Files Matters for SEO
Use keywords in file names and folders – When you save a file to be posted on your website, use your keywords in the file names.
For example, hand-painted-china.html would be a great filename for a business that sells hand-painted china.
Because you are not prohibited from using the same filename as your competitors, as you would be with your domain name, and because you can do this regardless of whether you use a WYSIWYG editor like Front Page or Dreamweaver without knowing much HTML, this technique is quite easy to implement and make a regular practice.
Don’t leave blank spaces in your filenames. Use an underscore character ( _ ) or hyphen ( – ) instead. I find both equally useful.
Select the Right Domain Name to Improve SEO
Select the right domain name – If you don’t already have a domain name (like www.mydomain.com) or have been considering changing it, selecting the right domain name can be very important. You’ll want your domain to reflect what your business does, and if at all possible include one or more of your targeted keywords.
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Select the Right Keywords for Your Site
Before you can attempt to try to optimize your website for search engines, you need to find the right keywords to target for your site. It is absolutely critical that you not skip this step because the rest of your SEO efforts depend on it.
There are a number of very good free keyword research tools available to help you with this part of your SEO efforts. You can also quickly compare the popularity of up to 5 keywords at once using Google Trends.
Keyword Research is Not Just About Search Volume
The crux of keyword research and selecting the right keywords for your website is not based on search engine volume alone. Search volume must be weighed carefully against the competitiveness of your keywords – the number of sites already ranking for those terms. The balance between high volume and low competition is the ideal selection.
For example, a recent check in WordTracker’s free keyword research tool for the term keywords returned an estimated daily search volume of 1,310 search queries per day, considered to be a strong volume. A search in Google for the term keywords returned 391,000,000 results, which is considered to be extremely competitive (prohibitively so, except for the largest and most authoritative sites). Someone with a smaller site would be better off selecting a lower volume keyword with less competition, rather than focus on an extremely competitive keyword or keyword phrase for which that site has virtually no hope of ranking well.
During the search for keywords, WordTracker’s tool also returned the phrase search engine keywords. While the volume for search engine keywords was only estimated to be 21 searches per day, the number of sites returned in a Google search for search engine keywords was only 704,000, making the term much easier to target for high search engine rankings. Any site would be better off getting 5 visitors per day for the keywords search engine keywords than it would be getting no visitors for the term keyowrds.