When your site is up and running, it’s all good but if you don’t have any traffic, all your efforts will be in vain. There are many free and paid ways to drive traffic to your site and one of the best is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Quality Content Makes or Breaks Your SEO Efforts
For SEO, quality content is the first and crucial step. If you don’t have quality content, you can try pumping up your traffic with SEO tricks but this will never bring you the desired results. Therefore, before you start with SEO tips and tricks, make sure that you can regularly provide high quality content.
Choose a Reliable Web Hosting
Reliable web hosting is one more thing you should consider before your start with SEO. If your web hosting is not reliable and your site is frequently down, spiders will have trouble indexing it and visitors won’t be able to browse your site. Reliable web hosting is vital to keep you on top.
SEO Starts With the Title Tag
The Title tag is very important both for your human visitors and for search engines. The Title tag should be both keyword-rich and informative, which is not as easy as it sounds.
Headings Come After the Title
Headings, also known as subheads, are also a place where every keyword counts a lot. Headings, such as H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 structurize your text, make it more readable and if they contain your keywords, this usually makes your page rank higher for the particular keywords.
Keywords in URLs Also Matter
In addition to the Title tag and the headings, one other place where keywords weigh a lot is the URL. The URL includes not only your domain name (i.e. reencoded.com) but also any other filenames (i.e. http://www.reencoded.com/2009/03/23/29-web-design-blogs-you-must-follow/).
Keywords in the Text
Keywords in the body text of your page are also important and if you have good keyword density (but no keyword stuffing), this will boost your rankings a lot. Among the many keyword tools Google Adwords Keyword Tool is the most reliable. You can include not only major keywords, which generally are more competitive but also minor keywords, for which there is less competition.
Clean Up Unnecessary Code
Search engines read not the text of your page but its code. This is why you should remove any junk from your code because this not only slows down your pages but also can drag you down in search results.
Don’t Leave the Alt Attributes of Images and Videos Empty
For search engines, images and videos are not text and they can’t be indexed directly. However, images and videos have an Alt attribute, where you can enter a keyword-rich description and get the image/video indexed.
Meta Descriptions Still Count
There were times when meta descriptions were the most important SEO tool but search engines got smarter and now they don’t rely on your Meta descriptions that much. Still, the text you enter as a meta description shows in search results and based on it users will decide if they want to visit your site or not. This is why you should add some meaningful, keyword-rich text in your descriptions.
Flash Is Not Good For SEO
Flash is one of the worst SEO disasters. You might have hard times discussing the issue with your designer because it is true that from a design point of view Flash sites are great but for SEO they are a nightmare. Still, you can use Flash but always provide a detailed HTML version of the Flash page or video.
“No Archive” and “No Index” Tags Are Useful
It is great that you have a lot of contents but not everything must be indexed. For instance, if you have pages that could be considered duplicate content, or simply pages you wouldn’t like to see in search results, use the “No Index” tag. Similarly, use the “No Archive” tag for pages, which don’t need archiving.
Don’t Forget About Social Media Marketing
Social media, such as social networking sites and social bookmarking sites, can not only drive traffic directly but you can use them to get backlinks – one of the most precious commodities in SEO.
Basically, these are the most important SEO rules to follow. Apply these rules and you will notice how much more traffic your site will get.
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