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Implementing SEO on Your Website

Published: Jul 29, 2009

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One thing that is the same for everyone with a website is the desire to get as many visitors as possible. Quality content is of course the single most important criteria for great success but there are a couple tips and tricks you can take advantage of in order to climb a couple of steps on the rankings of the search engines. In implementing Search Engine Optimization to the overall plan when creating your website you will boost the possibilities of getting found. There is nothing wrong with giving your website a little extra boost.

The oh so important Title tag

Let us begin with having a look at the title. Sounds easy to come up with a great title, does it not? Well, it is trickier than one might think as you should try to write a title that is both appealing for your visitors as well as for the search spiders. For the latter is the title one of the most important things when crawling a website. Begin with creating a list of your most important keywords as these will be the words that people search for when eventually finding your site. When this is done you should use one or two of these keywords in your headline as well as making it a relevant title. A big no-no is writing things such as witty jokes. At least if you are to take the search spiders into consideration as they are nothing but machines and will not understand the joke.

Do not forget about the subheads

Even though we just said that the titles are of the essence from a SEO point of view you should not forget about the sub-heads. Subheads are good from two aspects – they can change the direction of your text (avoiding huge blocks of text) and they are, just as the title, a great place to put a keyword. Let us take the subhead for this paragraph for example; it is optimized for the keyword “subheads”. When working with HTML the main title will an H1 which is followed by subheads H2, H3, H4 and H5. In making both the main title and the subheads bold they will easier to read for search spiders as well as for your visitors.

The URL Should be Optimized

The URL is also an important place to put one of your keywords. Try to find a domain name that includes one of your most important keywords and you are off to a great start. Many of the best domains will already be taken but if get creative we are sure that you will find a domain name that is more than satisfying.

Keywords are always necessary

It is not only important to use keywords in the titles, subheads and URLs – they should be used throughout the entire text. With this said, it is important to not stuff the text with keywords, it should be done naturally. Finding out what keywords that are more important than other can easily be done with the help of for example Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Google Adwords Keywords Suggestions is a great tool that will present you with the number of searches for a certain keyword as well as what kind of competition there is for this word. If you wish you can also enter your URL (or the URL of a similar website) and you will get a list of keywords that are related to the content of the website. Simply said is the Google Adwords tool a great little thing that can save you a ton of work.

Remove all useless code

Once your site is up and running you should go through everything one more time and remove useless code that is just lying around doing no good. All codes are constantly going through changes which mean that you have to update your code from time to time. Old and redundant code will only slow down the search engines and in worst case scenario they will not even bother listing your site on the place that it deserves to be.

Image Alt attributes

It is a given fact that people love looking at images but the same does not go for the search engines which is the reason to why you should add “Alt” attributes to them. In doing so you will describe what the image is about and hence you will be able to gain traffic via for example Google images. Adding an Alt tag is very easy to and it can look something like this:

Work on the Meta descriptions

Think about it, the short description you see on the search results can be a converting success or a real disaster, making it just as important as the title. In writing a good Meta description you will be able to persuade people that your site is worth checking up. There are a couple of guidelines that you should follow when writing this description and they are as follows. The length of the description should be between 25 and 40 words. Make sure that the descriptions include all of the targeted keywords that are unique for each of the pages. It is usually said that Meta descriptions should be written with a “marketing style” but we think that “informative” is a better word.

Avoid using Flash

Flash sites might look cool but they are really bad from a SEO perspective. While the software is qualitative and popular it does not attract the Google and Yahoo search engines. It is possible to add elements of SEO to a flash site but it can be pretty difficult and hiring people to do it for you can be rather expensive. So, if you think that you will attract most of your visitors via the search engines, try to stay away from Flash.

Do however use “No Archive” and “No Index” tags

A website contains a lot of content and not everything needs to be indexed. Such things, that do not have be get indexed, are the about page, privacy policy pages and contact information pages. In using the appropriate codes they will not be indexed, speeding up the indexing process, and get you higher up in the search engine results.

If you are working with blogs

Blogs are no exception – if you run a blog, make sure that it is optimized for the web. Most blog platforms are good for driving traffic and one of the best tips we can give you is sticking to only one platform and make sure that it is updated on a regular basis. The longer you have been using a blog platform the better your chances will be of it climbing the steps on the search engine results. Other than this do the same rules as for regular websites apply for blogs. Try to write compelling content and include keywords in titles, subheads and in the text itself. If you are using WordPress we can recommend you downloading the “All in One SEO Pack”, a plugin that is great for everyone that wish to boost their possibilities of optimizing their blog and consequently getting a larger number of visitors.