• Accurately revealing the content of a page by using meta tags including page title, keywords and description helps some search engines list websites. and make sure that every page has unique page title and page description metadata.

    Titles and descriptions are used in the snippets (that is the text in some search results) think of these as your websites advertising space. The more people that click on your listing and stay there, the more likely you are to move through the rankings.

    Remember to make them relevant include keywords but don’t spam!

    Don’t cheat

    Don’t include hidden links, keywords or cloaking. Search engines can find cheaters and sites that get found will be penalised, if not emitted completely.

    Keywords

    Keywords and phrases however are still very relevant to ranking – as long as they are used wisely – i.e. where necessary. It is vital to strike a balance between engaging informative content for people and keywords for search engines. Don’t repeat the key term more than three times so to avoid keyword stuffing. A rough rule is to have one of your keywords in every 20.

    URLs

    Keyword rich domains are beneficial, as they will give your website visibility in the search engines relatively quickly.

    Keep URLs short for better SEO and use your key term in them – shorter URLs are more memorable and key terms are easily visible to crawlers when placed here.

    Specific phrases

    It is more effective to use a specific phrase rather than a generic keyword or keyword combinations.

    Definitely don’t use popular, yet irrelevant search terms to attract traffic as it just won’t convert, this in turn will reduce the amount of time a visitor stays on your site which will reduce your rankings.

    Site structure

    An optimised site structure is one that adds weight to a specific page and term by breaking out niches in each main keyword area – this is known as siloing. Another benefit of this structure is that the visitor is funnelled in a logical order to the service or product / information they were looking for.

    An Introduction to SEO
    Next – Linking

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    This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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