Simple Tools For SEO Beginners

In the past, I worked for companies who focused on the ‘digital forefront’ of the marketing industry. In that time, I was forced to discover the importance of online visibility. Many companies would put away thousands of dollars each month to move up one or two ranks in the organic listing search pool (if they were lucky). But, you don’t have to fret over big costs for visibility online. There are several things that you can do to ensure higher potential of visibility of your website online. Here are some basic guidelines for your viewing pleasure:

1. Implement unique META titles and descriptions for all of your pages. Each title and description should be unique to every single individual page. This is very easy to do.

2. Add an HTML sitemap to your site. This is a single page that includes links to the main pages of your websites. If your site is small, you should add every page. Larger sites should at least have all the main and secondary pages in the sitemap. Sitemaps give search engines a means to find all of your site’s pages on one single page.

3. Target ‘long tail’ keywords in your sub pages. Long tail keywords are those that are not as highly competitive as your main keyword. Target a fairly competitive keyword for your index page and less competitive keywords for all sub pages. Don’t get into the habit of targeting the same few keywords throughout the site, as you may lose valuable traffic to the inner pages.

4. Create keywords that are not the most popular for your industry on your website. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it is actually quite effective. You want to use strategic wording of those keywords throughout your site, but remember to only do one or two per page. This way, spiders will view your content as being legitimate to those keywords, rather than an unreliable source.

5. Use underline, bold, strong and italics tags on each pages keywords. Search Engines give more emphasis to words with these sorts of tags. It is easy to get carried away, so you don’t want to go crazy with these, but a few on each page will be very effective.

6. Use H1 and H2 tags with your main and secondary keywords. Each page on your web site should have one or two targeted keywords within the page. Just add < h1 >keyword< /h1 > to the main keyword and the same for your secondary keyword replacing h1 with h2 and deleting the spaces.

7. Linking to and from your website is extremely valuable to the integrity of your website. If you are linking out to sites that are respectable (ex. .org / .com / .info / .gov / etc.) your website will carry more staying power and robots will like this. Some ways to build links would be to other resources or information that you or your company may use, linking to news releases or articles that are important to you and your company for informative purposes, and perhaps other social marketing websites (such as twitter, you tube and facebook).

8. Change content on your website. The more you can add unique content, the more your website can reach all facets of the internet. Think of it as building a web and reaching out to as many different facets as you can. The bigger the web, the more your website will rank for a larger variety and number of terms and keywords. A simple way to do this is to add a blog to your website, and make sure to update it with appropriate content on a regular basis. Allowing people to comment on your website will also build its reputation online, so don’t be afraid to reach out to others; After all, thats what the web was created for in the first place.

Hopefully these tips will help you attempt to make your site more search-engine friendly. I find that there is always a growing number of tactics that you can use in your unique areas, and it is always changing, so keep your eyes and ears open.