Search Engine Optimisation sounds like a highly technical field, however you can achieve a lot with basic common sense.
Content is King
- Good content is very powerful. Tthe best way to build your placement in search engines and just like at school – do not plagiarise – viewers can tell when many sites pop up with the same content and it lowers the image. Always develop your own even if using multiple sources. Alternatives review another’s content with some value added comments and link to it.
- keep each page file size down to about 100K or less – apparently google chops any excess.
- Opinions vary however try for page length about 200 words
- keyword density between 5% and 20%. Do not “stuff”.
- More text than html elements
- No unnecessary anything: no fancy stuff, no iframes, no javascript, no ads…
- Use headings and bolding sensibly, it is questionable whether they add to seo.
- That said, use a focused keyword or phrase in your page title or h1 heading
More technical aspects:
The file name or url or “slug”
- short, descriptive, keywords may help, probably not a lot,
- Use hyphens to separate keywords, not underscores (google see’s as separate words then)
Metatags still have value – the metadata title often appears in the search engine results
- very important, do not leave blank, or defaulted
- ideally less than 64 characters, not too short, not too long – 5 to 7 words
- contain one or two of the most important keywords or phrases in the priority order, but do not “stuff” with keywords,
- Leave out the “power” words like “NEW”, “Guaranteed” etc, and any “fluff” descriptive adjective parts of a key phrase – isolate the main keyword.
- appealing to the eye (uppercase/lowercase mix etc)
- unique so will stand out in the search results
Domain name
The keywords in the domain not so important now for Search engine optimisation, but the text used to link to the site is. Thus there is an indirect benefit in having keyword in domain name as many people will actually use the domain name as the link text! The domain name should be:
- short, descriptive, memorable
- easy to say and spell – I am not a fun of using misspellings!
Quality validated designs are important
- Use CSS (and make sure that it validates) – smaller pages load faster and amre more easily browsed by search engine spiders.
- Use a theme or template that generates valid html – search engines like code compliant websites
Use a sitemap
- they help the search engine spider understand which are your most important pages
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