SEO can be a difficult and tedious process at times. But thankfully that is not always the case. Here are 14 quick and easy tips that can easily help your site rank better in the search engines.
- Image file names. You can use the file name to give a tiny boost to your overall SEO efforts. For example, let’s say you have a website about sports cars and you’re wanting to put an image of a hot rod on a page. You snap a picture of one with your digital camera and then you plan on uploading the image to your website. You end up having an image with a file name something like “DSC001.jpg” which isn’t really very descriptive of what the image is about. It would be better to rename the image file to something relative to the keywords of your website, such as “sports-car.jpg” or “hot-rod.jpg”. Giving image files a descriptive file name helps the search engines get a better idea of what your images are about.
- Image alt tags. Along with providing descriptive file names for your image files, the alt tag is an element that shouldn’t be ignored. Use your desired keywords in the alt tag, but try to make it relevant without getting spammy about it. Good alt tag descriptions will also help you get more image search traffic.
- Bold text. It’s always a good idea to highlight your targeted keywords on a webpage with bold text. Search engines consider bolded text to have more importance than regular text. Don’t go overboard with this though; limit your keyword bolding to no more than a few times on a page.
- Addresses & phone numbers. Inserting your address or phone number into your webpage is vital if you’re a business, as this greatly enhances your localized search prospects. Whether you do this in the header or footer, putting your info between the html <address> tag is not something you should overlook.
- Keyword placement. It is always a good idea to insert the keyword you want to be ranked for close to the beginning of your body text. When indexing your site, search engines pay attention to the prominence of words on your page and tend to give more weight to the words that are closer to the top.
- Breadcrumb navigation. You’ve seen breadcrumb navigation before, haven’t you? Many websites place this right above their page content to let visitors know where they are at within the website. Not only does this help with the overall navigation through the website, it strengthens the internal linking of your website.
- Title tags in links. Inserting a title tag to the links in your website is a good habit to get into as it gives the search engines a little more info on what is being linked to. I admit that I have not been an avid practitioner of this, but it is a good practice nonetheless.
- Videos and text. When you embed a video on your website, the user can view the video and know what it is about but the search engines have a hard time with that. Many SEO professionals recommend placing relevant text around the video, believing that the search engines think that the text immediately before or after the video describes the content of said video.
- Unique title tags. Some websites have multiple pages that have identical title tags. This is never a good thing, as the title tag is one of the first things the search engines look at to get an idea of what the webpage is about. If multiple pages are given the same title, it doesn’t help your efforts in getting your site ranked as well as it could.
- Keywords in the domain or URL. Having the keyword you want to get ranked well for in your domain name or URL is a huge help in your SEO efforts. I can think of no better example illustrating this than a website I have about wholesale sunglasses. The domain name is xsportzsunglasses.com and nowhere on that website will you find the phrase “xsportz sunglasses” (a brand of knockoff sunglasses). It is not mentioned in any post or page, but if you search Google for that term you’ll see my site is ranked 3rd or 4th in the listings. Not bad for never mentioning that term once on that website.
- Sitemaps. It is always a good practice to have a sitemap with your website that lists all the pages of your site. This gives the search engines a nice little reference file to spider all the content of your site.
- Don’t be stingy with the links. When you are adding content to your site, be generous with the links. Linking to other relevant websites enhances the content your are providing to your visitors. And it never fails that the more often you link to others, more and more people will link to you.
- Acquire deep links. If you are working on building backlinks to your site, don’t try to get all your links to just point to your home page. If all the external links you have point solely to your home page, it gives the impression to search engines that either your backlinks are not natural or all the rest of the pages of your site contain worthless content.
- Get SEO information from more than one source. Search engine optimization can be a tricky science at times. The honest truth is that unless you are the person who programmed the search engine algorithms you cannot say with 100% certainty what exactly it takes to get ranked well. Sure, there are many universally accepted truths out there on search engine theory, but there is also a lot of misinformation floating around as well. If you’re looking for SEO tips or advice, seek out multiple sources for the answers to your questions. If you get the same response from multiple reputable sources, chances are very good that you’re getting good information.
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