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10 SEO Tips
By Ed Zivkovic - http://www.ezau.com
It is not hard to be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to
getting search engine traffic because there is so much out of
date information being circulated.
Not only is there out of date or invalid SEO advice getting
around, there is also information which if acted upon, can
result in your pages being banned.
The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic
understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which
are easily understood by the most popular search engines.
Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two
of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are google and
yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is
msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.
Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the
most visitors first and work your way down.
Basic SEO
1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine
robots will know what your page is about. Inserting a keyword
or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing
targeted traffic to your site.
Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can
relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a
search result. Treat it like a headline.
2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page
from different pages on your site. This is especially useful
if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link
to a specific page the better.
3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within
the body of the page.
It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not
contained within the body of the page.
Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader
who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they
have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page
where they intended to visit.
Robots like this too because now there is a relation between
the title of your page and the headline.
Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most
important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good
place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of
your article and in the sub-headings.
4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your
website. Search engine robots might determine that all your
pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this
happens, your pages might not get indexed.
I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help
the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to
insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is
the same as the title tag text.
5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag or even
spend too much time on it. SEO pros all agree that these tags
are not as important today as they once were. I just place my
headline once within the keywords and description tags.
6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly
neighborhoods.
A good rule of thumb is if your pages do not contain any words
that reflect the content of the site you are linking to, do not
link to it.
7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for
robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human
friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the
search.
8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the
HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page
where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.
My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the
page. The menu consists of links not images. The links are
keywords. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the
title of the link appears.
9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will
help search engines that index images to find your pages and
will also help readers who use text only web browsers.
10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a
submission service or submission software. Doing so could get
your site penalized or even banned.
Here is the submission page for google:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks.
There is no need to submit more that one page. Robots follow
links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site
will get indexed.
My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots
follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting
more than the main index page once.
More SEO Tips
Get the facts here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This
page will explain most of what you should focus on along with
what you should forget about.
If you have been thinking about handing over the task of SEO to
someone outside of yourself, you should read some warnings
before you part with any money.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
SEO Discussion
Most SEO Professionals will not tell you about the goose that
laid the golden egg. The following link contains jealously
guarded SEO secrets in the form of a discussion forum at
google.com.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general
You can search the forum for specific questions you may have. I
like to just lurk around and read the messages.
The author, Ed Zivkovic is a self-taught webmaster. His website
(http://www.ezau.com) contains articles with all sorts of tips
for work at home webmasters. Contact Ed here: http://www.ezau.com/zcontact.html
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