A guide to the basics of Search Engine Optimization
Allow the following list of the basics of search engine optimization to act as a guide during the creation of your next website. Using these techniques when creating your website will help improve your search engine rankings and the results that are generated.
1. Don’t expect overnight success.
Effective search engine optimization takes a lot of time and hard work. Patience will be your greatest virtue when optimizing your sites for high search engine rankings. Search engines take time to compile all the factors that will allow your website to achieve higher rankings.
2. Nothing compares to strong, well-written content.
Contrary to popular belief, well-formed and well-written content is the backbone of effective search engine optimization. Well-written content is intriguing, interesting and will ensure that your visitors are constantly scanning your website for updates. Return visitors will be interested enough to spread word about your website, and may even link to your website from their own. We discuss the importance of being linked to a little further in this article.
3. Use descriptive titles for your pages.
Giving your pages descriptive, yet simple titles will make it a lot easier for search engines to recognize what the contents of each page will be. It’s such a simple concept that is often overlooked. Avoid using the same title for each page – it will confuse search engines since there would be so many pages with the same title and it will be difficult to determine what the page is about.
4. Make good use of the heading tags.
The heading tags h1 to h6 are reserved for – you guessed it – headings. It cannot be stressed enough how important these tags are for generating strong search engine rankings. Although using images will allow you to use the fonts of your choice, search engines will not recognize them. There are image replacement techniques, but most of them involve hiding your text. This may cause a slight risk, because your hidden text may appear to search engines as hidden keywords. Hiding keywords is not allowed and will most likely penalize your websites rankings.
5. Get other sites to link to you.
The more times your website is linked by other websites, the more relevant your website will appear to Google. Google determines high rankings not only by the content on your website, but also by the number of websites that link to yours.
6. Create your websites with valid and accessible markup language.
If your website is written in a poor, messy version of HTML, the browser will most likely still be able to render it. There may be some parts of your website that are displaying incorrectly, but for the most part web browsers are smart enough to display your content the way it was intended. Search engines may not be able to read through your mess of code to determine the content of your website. Writing your website with valid and accessible means you will have more content than HTML code, and your website will load much faster.
7. You can’t fool the search engines.
Search engines want their search results to be accurate. There is no point in tricking them, because it will get you nowhere. Hiding text that contains keywords, or padding your alt tags with an unnecessary amount of words are sure ways to get your website penalized and possibly banned from most search engines.
8. Target one primary search term per page.
Place target keyword phrases in various spots on your page.
Here is a short list of the places to include your primary search term:
1. Title tag.
2. Description tag.
3. Within the first 100 words of the body paragraph.
4. h1 – h6 heading tags.
5. Use it several times in the body.
6. Bold it several times in the body.
7. Link to the page using the phrase in an anchor.
