Things you should always do with SEO

So what are the do’s when it comes to Search Engine Optimization? In our last discussion we talked about things that you shouldn’t do when optimizing your blog / site for search engines. To follow up please read our other topic “Things Never To Do With SEO” before you get started reading this.

Let’s get started shall we?

Don’t optimize once then quit.

When you are going to optimize for search engines, never quit after a day or two. SEO is not a one time thing. You have to stay on top of it everyday, with every new addition you make to your site, every new page. With search engines, they are always changing their algorithms so the methods and techniques that we use now might not work down the road.

When applying SEO Techniques to your site you will never see results instantly. Keep in mind that patience is the key and the seo methods that you use on your site now will benefit you down the road.

For beginners.

If you are new to SEO the few tips that you learn are not going to be enough. Always look around the net to learn new SEO techniques. Look around for new articles and tutorials that are recent also.

Using web analytics.

This is crucial when you are applying these methods to your website. This can help you see what and what isn’t working so you can switch it up. Also keep track on all of your content and see what is most popular, what the readers like to see. That way you can base new content off of those things.

Using a site map

Site Maps are crucial to getting a higher ranking in search engines. A site map helps spiders find all of the important pages or the pages that you want to be shown on search engines. With every new page you add be sure to keep your map updated. if you have navigation menu’s that are hard for spiders to crawl this will also direct them down the right path. I have explained this in other articles about using text in your navigation menu’s. If your site is fairly big, use a few different site maps.

Using SEO in your URLs

Don’t use basic names in your urls. Don’t use a bunch of numbers or letters either. You want to make your urls have keywords in them spaced out by hyphens. Don’t use underscores, hyphens mean the same thing as a space between the words as underscores do not.Don’t over do it with the hyphens though because it will make your page look like it is a spam to users. I’d say when doing this have a limit of about 3 or 4. For example yoursite.com/seo-tips-and-tricks.html

Keyword Research

When you begin a website or a project you should do this from the start. This way you can figure out what keywords you want to rank for and what not to. Look at the volume of one keyword to the next. Try opening up a PPC account also. I prefer Google Ad Words. This helps you find out the volume of your keywords.

Title and Meta Tags

Search engines don’t care much for Meta Tags anymore because of the abuse in the past but again it does not hurt to do this. Titles are one of the most important factors. With your titles simply use the keywords that you are building your page and article around. This helps your ranking. Meta keywords won’t help you rank but when you have a Meta Description it will show up on search engines under your link and explains the page a little bit. When using Meta Keywords limit it to 600-700 characters. In the Meta Keywords only put keywords in there that don’t appear on your page.

Writing

Don’t just write for search engines and stuff all of your pages. This makes them looks spammy and your readers will not stick around. Write pages for your readers, the search engines have bots but has a bot read your article and stuck around? Has a bot bought anything or even signed up for a mailing list? You need keywords and such in your articles but don’t stuff the hell out of it.

Unique Content

As I have explained in other articles, unique content is the number one thing to do. This can be hard depending on what your niche is but if you have content that isn’t anywhere else, your readers will be intrigued. Make sure your content is interesting also, just because it is unique doesn’t mean it is great. Combine intriguing with unique and you got your self something nice.

Anchor Text – Internal Linking

As I have explained in my other article “Building Page Rank“, Anchor Text is also a must. Anchor Text helps spiders know what the page you linked to is about. Using keywords in the text helps your ranking but also tells them what the page is about when listing it in the search engines. If your anchor just says “Here”, it doesn’t help much for search engine visibility.

Building Links

Submit your site to directories that are popular, high ranked and trusted. Try and get links from popular sites in your niche and category. If you are running a site that is for your local area you can try to find trusted sites that are in your area geographically. Analyze your inbound links also to find what you may be looking for when linking and back linking. You can read more on back linking in our previous article “SEO Techniques all websites should use” along with many other techniques.

Social Media & Networks

Using social media websites like digg.com , propeller.com and many others gets your articles and sites exposed better. Also using social networks like twitter also can do the same thing. This helps you connect with many others directly to better promote your website. You can also use twitter to post new updates to your followers automatically. For more information, read the latest article I wrote for “Increasing site traffic with twitter on auto-pilot“.

And there you have it. These are some of the main things you should always do and use when optimizing your website or blog for search engines. If you have any questions please comment below or ask and discuss it in there forum. If you would like one on one training feel free to contact me.

craigygee@therantandrave.net

Things never to do with SEO

Today we are going to discuss some things you should avoid when optimizing your blog/website for search engines. Shall we begin?

SEO Spam and and paying to submit to directories.

Have you ever seen ads around the internet stating that they will submit your website to hundreds or thousands of search engines? How about 500 directories? Or maybe buying thousands of backlinks for a small price? Never give in to this, you just can’t buy this kind of work for $25.00 . Your site will be submitted to link farms of a directory. No SEO can gaurantee a number one ranking and for a small price your site won’t be submitted to all those directories and search engines. No true SEO is a spammer.

Have you ever put your content across several domains?

This is not something good to do unless you have a bulk user base and for certain content considerations. This will get a bunch of your sites in the SERPS so look up more about sub-domains and domains with search engine optimization. Submitting to search engines can’t hurt but really, only submit to a couple of the top ones. Usually you won’t have to do this because the search engines will automatically crawl your website when you are linked with a site that is being crawled.

Make your pages crawlable!

Now you never want to make your site to where a crawler can’t access it or crawl all of your pages you want. This happens when you don’t write your robots.txt file correctly. Also having sessions Id’s or too many variables in your urls can effect this. Always use words and keywords of your categories and topics in your urls. When you have a navigation menu you, never use all all images or flash. The crawlers cannot read these things. Unless you have a portfolio or something related, never use an all image or flash website period. Crawlers read the text in your site, the aren’t human and cannot read the text or images in flash.

For more information on optimizing your navigation menu’s and a better explanation on using text instead of flash and all images, check out a previous topic I wrote on optimizing your categories .

Targeting general keywords and why not to.

If you are starting a website or blog and if your website isn’t ranked well yet, never try to target general popular keywords that have a lot of competition. Always optimize for relevant specific keywords that will bring traffic that you targeted traffic. For example, you have a video game website and you decide to target the keyword “Gaming”. You will be blown away by competition without a chance, even if ranked decently. Try to rank for something more relevant than just general gaming and start off with some keywords that have lower competition and build your way up as you go up in ranking.

Keyword stuffing and irrelevant keywords.

This is a DON’T and you can get banned from it by Google. Stuffing your meta tags with irrelevant keywords means that these keywords have no relation to your website or topic. Google does not like this even though google does not base rankings off of meta tags anymore because it was too abused in the past it is still good to use them anyways. The max you should use is roughly 600-700 characters in a meta tag. Limit it to no more than about twenty targeted phrase of maybe two words or more. Make sure you separate them with commas of course. If you are using the same keyword avoid using it more than three to seven times. List them in the order of how important they are to your website and what you are trying to rank for. Do not use hidden keywords as text in your pages (people generally do this in the footer). Google considers this spam and will ban you for this. People do this by stuffing them in the footer and making the text the same color as the background color.

Avoid duplicate content.

Try to avoid this and avoid using the same titles in every page. If your page is on a certain topic, use the topics keywords in the title. Do the same with the pages of your categories. Don’t use www.blah.com and blah.com to direct to your homepage. Believe it or not, these both are two seperate addresses and will be considered duplicate content. Don’t link your home page with www.blah.com/index.html from www.blah.com either. Use the one address that you established for your website.

Site layout, structure , usablity.

Make sure that your site is optimized for both your users and search engine spiders. Use proper structure, navigation, descriptive links and text and headers. You want your website to look good and be easy to navigate your your users and visitors but at the same time you want it to where spiders will just eat your site and pages up. I stress again using text over images as much as possible.

Back-linking to relevant sites.

If your website is let’s say once again, about “Gaming” , don’t link to a weight-loss website because you have nothing in common. When building back links, you always want to build links between you and websites that are relevant and similar to what your website is about. This will work out for the both of you and eventually you can get more back links through those people.

Using anchor text and mixing it up.

When using anchor text, don’t use the exact same anchor text for each site that you are building a back link from. Switch it up. This is called unnatural link building. So vary up your keywords in your anchor text on different websites with keywords that are related to your site and related to words you are trying to rank for. If you don’t know what anchor text is, read up on a couple previous articles that I wrote that discusses Building Page Rank and Getting Indexed In Google fast .

Spamming your link.

I am sure you have seen tips on commenting in guest-books, blogs, forums and so on so fourth. There is a difference between posting comments with a link in it and spamming it. Most of the time, you have the option of including your link when posting in a blog or guest-book. In a forum you can include your link in your signature. Don’t just down right spam your link all over fast in hopes of getting traffic and links back to your site. This won’t help and you will get banned and more than likely your post will be deleted. Nobody likes a spammer, not even you.

Quit worrying about ranking.

Everyone seems to obsess and fret over Google page rank more than they should. If you keep up with the key fundamentals of running a website or a blog, your ranking will go up more and more as time goes on. Quit worrying about it because just focusing on this will end up cramping your style. Focus on keeping your site and/or blog updated with fresh unique content daily, interacting with your visitors, users, and other blog members, and keep doing basic SEO on your pages and you will be fine. Also, quit checking your rankings every single day. They are going to do what they are gonna do, let them be and stay focused.

This list can go on and on…and on! These are some key tips to running a successful site and keeping your optimization A-1. If you have any other tips feel free to comment.

Getting indexed in Google fast

Here are some simple SEO Tips.

A great way of getting known in search engines for certain keywords is backlinking. How you ask? This is simple, make sure you are getting links from a quality site with unique content and a good page ranking. But what we are going to discuss is anchor text and what is anchor text. You can use this in guest blogging.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is just some basic HTML. Basically you are linking back to your website (back linking) and using keywords in your link. these keywords should be ones that you are trying to rank for in which this is a great SEO method on ranking higher.

Here is an example of what anchor text is.

< a href=”linktoyoursite.com” > Your Keyword here </a>

And you would get Your Keyword Here

Here is my example that I actually did in this article.

SEO Tips

Now you see that it links back to my website but is using a keyword that I am trying to rank for. Now here is something else I want to discuss. It is called “Alt Text” / “Title” . Alternative text / Title is a description of your link when someone hovers over it. If you hover over the link above it will say “SEO Tricks“. This also helps.

Why isn’t the alt text/link title the same as the keyword?

I am doing this because you want a keyword density of about 6%. So you don’t want to use the same keywords more than once or twice in an article. So if you plan on using it 5 times make sure to change the keywords up to maybe instead of SEO Techniques to SEO Technique or something similar.

So here are two examples of how to do this using alt and title.

<a title=”SEO Technique” href=”http://www.therantandrave.net/”>SEO Techniques</a>

<a href=”http://www.therantandrave.net/” alt=”SEO Technique”>SEO Techniques</a>

And these are just some basic SEO Tips on how to get indexed in Google fast.

Any questions?

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SEO , Seo Tips, anchor text, black-links, backlinking, backlinks, keywords, get indexed in google fast, getting indexed in google fast