5 Steps for Quick and Dirty Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This lens will show you the five best SEO tools that you can know when you're first starting out. Most website owners find a dramatic increase in their rankings by only tweaking these five things. The best part is you can do it all in ten minutes!
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Search Engine Optimization Made Easy: 10 Easy Steps for in Instant Search Engine Boost
Learn the most basic fundamentals of SEO to instantly boost your search engine ranking position.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can often be a confusing discipline when you first decide to optimize your website. The search engines can seem even more mysterious, and they certainly don't want you to know how to easily outrank all of your competitors. Hitting the front page can often be difficult for very common sites, but there are certain techniques you can apply to your site to give an instant boost in rankings on 90% of sites. I'm going to assume that you have a basic knowledge of html; if you don't you may want to look at these great html tutorials. Let's go ahead and get our SEO effort started.
1.) The Title Says It All
The first tip that I generally give anyone seeking to optimize their site is to check their title tags. Many people when first making a site will put the name of their site in the title tag and use this same tag across all of the pages of their site. This is definitely not what you want to do.
A search engine usually places a great amount of importance on the title tags of a site. These tags are used as the link text in search engine results and, because they appear high in your html code, are usually the first keywords that the search engine spider sees. For example, if you have one page devoted to blue widgets and another for red widgets, make the titles for those pages "blue widgets" and "red widgets" so the search engines will be able to tell the difference between the pages.
2.) Make Your Headlines Do Your Work
Many people in the SEO world also place a lot of importance on using keyword phrases in the headlines of your site. For example, if you have a paragraph on red widgets, make your headline "A Tutorial on Red Widgets" so you can incorporate your key phrase and a few more words as well.
The effect of this strategy is two fold. This technique serves to increase your keyword density, or the number of times a certain phrase appears divided by the total number of words. Search engines use this metric to determine the main points of a page. Aside from this benefit, the search engine will assume that if your keyword phrase appears in big letters as a heading, that must be what your site is about.
3.) Sometimes You Have to Be Bold
In the same vein as putting phrases in headlines, another good technique is to make some of your keywords stand out by putting them in or tags. This will make the phrases stand out to your reader because they will appear in bold font on the page. The same logic applies to using the tag for italics.
The benefit of this with the search engine is much the same as the headline effect mentioned above. Because the search engine realizes this text stands out, they assume that it's a good indicator of the subject matter. I usually try to incorporate my primary keyword phrase at least two or more times in bold tags.
4.) Branching Out Into the META-Physical
One of the most overlooked aspects of real basic SEO is the use of the META tags. These tags go in the head of your html document like so:
META tags have received a bad rap in recent years because of some past negative connotations. Search engine used to present results based on meta tags that listed relevant keywords. Probably was, people realized the keywords didn't have to relevant and because to fill up their page with all sorts of terms to help them rank better.
All search engines have since moved away from using the META tags much for ranking purposes, but they still have an important role. In the above piece of code the "Your Description Here" would be the description when someone saw your site on Google. By changing the title of a page and then changing the META description attribute you can control what information about your site someone sees in Google's search results. Make your description catchy enough and you're very likely to draw many more users into your site.
5.)Pictures and ALT-ernate Universes
Cheesy headlines aside, pictures can serve a very concrete place in the SEO strategy for your website. Pictures can serve as a sneaky way to get a few more keywords into your page. Let's say that I want to upload a picture of one of my red widgets. Instead of leaving a random number as the picture name, why not rename it "affordable-red-widget.jpg" or whatever such file extension it may have. With this file name I've snuck my keyword phrase into the filename and increased the number of times it appears on my page. Now when someone searches for red widget on Google Images they are much more likely to see your result as well.
Another sneaky image seo trick is to utilize the alt attribute for image tags. Let's say I'm still hawking red widgets, so my image tag would appear like this:
What I've done here is used the filename like we discussed before and combined it with the alternate attribute. This attribute is used to display text if the user's browser can't display the image for some reason, but we're not too concerned with that. What we like about this attribute is it lets us sneak in that keyword phrase one more time. Remember keyword density? By upping the density of your keywords a little bit with these tips the search engines are much more likely to realize what your site is about and give you a stellar ranking.
1.) The Title Says It All
The first tip that I generally give anyone seeking to optimize their site is to check their title tags. Many people when first making a site will put the name of their site in the title tag and use this same tag across all of the pages of their site. This is definitely not what you want to do.
A search engine usually places a great amount of importance on the title tags of a site. These tags are used as the link text in search engine results and, because they appear high in your html code, are usually the first keywords that the search engine spider sees. For example, if you have one page devoted to blue widgets and another for red widgets, make the titles for those pages "blue widgets" and "red widgets" so the search engines will be able to tell the difference between the pages.
2.) Make Your Headlines Do Your Work
Many people in the SEO world also place a lot of importance on using keyword phrases in the headlines of your site. For example, if you have a paragraph on red widgets, make your headline "A Tutorial on Red Widgets" so you can incorporate your key phrase and a few more words as well.
The effect of this strategy is two fold. This technique serves to increase your keyword density, or the number of times a certain phrase appears divided by the total number of words. Search engines use this metric to determine the main points of a page. Aside from this benefit, the search engine will assume that if your keyword phrase appears in big letters as a heading, that must be what your site is about.
3.) Sometimes You Have to Be Bold
In the same vein as putting phrases in headlines, another good technique is to make some of your keywords stand out by putting them in or tags. This will make the phrases stand out to your reader because they will appear in bold font on the page. The same logic applies to using the tag for italics.
The benefit of this with the search engine is much the same as the headline effect mentioned above. Because the search engine realizes this text stands out, they assume that it's a good indicator of the subject matter. I usually try to incorporate my primary keyword phrase at least two or more times in bold tags.
4.) Branching Out Into the META-Physical
One of the most overlooked aspects of real basic SEO is the use of the META tags. These tags go in the head of your html document like so:
META tags have received a bad rap in recent years because of some past negative connotations. Search engine used to present results based on meta tags that listed relevant keywords. Probably was, people realized the keywords didn't have to relevant and because to fill up their page with all sorts of terms to help them rank better.
All search engines have since moved away from using the META tags much for ranking purposes, but they still have an important role. In the above piece of code the "Your Description Here" would be the description when someone saw your site on Google. By changing the title of a page and then changing the META description attribute you can control what information about your site someone sees in Google's search results. Make your description catchy enough and you're very likely to draw many more users into your site.
5.)Pictures and ALT-ernate Universes
Cheesy headlines aside, pictures can serve a very concrete place in the SEO strategy for your website. Pictures can serve as a sneaky way to get a few more keywords into your page. Let's say that I want to upload a picture of one of my red widgets. Instead of leaving a random number as the picture name, why not rename it "affordable-red-widget.jpg" or whatever such file extension it may have. With this file name I've snuck my keyword phrase into the filename and increased the number of times it appears on my page. Now when someone searches for red widget on Google Images they are much more likely to see your result as well.
Another sneaky image seo trick is to utilize the alt attribute for image tags. Let's say I'm still hawking red widgets, so my image tag would appear like this:
What I've done here is used the filename like we discussed before and combined it with the alternate attribute. This attribute is used to display text if the user's browser can't display the image for some reason, but we're not too concerned with that. What we like about this attribute is it lets us sneak in that keyword phrase one more time. Remember keyword density? By upping the density of your keywords a little bit with these tips the search engines are much more likely to realize what your site is about and give you a stellar ranking.
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