Top 10 SEO tips to help you improve your search ranking

In the past few years I have helped many website owners achieve first page listing in Google. When I asked myself what are the top 10 most crucial elements that must be right to achieve first page listing, this is what I came up with. Without exception I have had to get every single element below right for my clients to ensure they appear on the first page of Google.

1. Content is king.  Well known fact and always recommended by SEO specialists. It all starts with content. If you have good compelling content which your target audience will find useful then optimising your site will be all that much easier.

You will benefit from:

• Regularly updated content
• Satisfying your customers needs and problems
• Answering common questions your customers might have
• Be specific and focused
• Niche is good

For more reading about good content strategies here is a useful post on SEOmoz.org: Content is King!

2. Choose the right keyword: What do you want to be best known for? What does your brand stand for? What is the main search term people would search for when they look for your products and services?  This is about identifying the right keyword or combination of keywords (phrases) that you want to optimise your page for. For example for the home page you want to choose one primary phrase which normally comprises of 2-4 words. This primary phrase is the most likely search term your potential customers would search for. To help you identify your primary search phrase please read my keyword research 101 post.

3. Title of the page: By far the most important element to get right. Almost everybody agrees that this is one of the top three criteria’s when robots like Google are trying to rank your site’s relevancy.  Make sure you place the main keywords here. If you competed step 2 successfully and identified your primary search phrase then you want to make sure the primary search phrase is mentioned in the title.

4. Heading. Have you ever heard of H1, H2, H3 etc? if not then the only way to find them is by doing view source in your browser. H1 is your heading number one (the large text heading of your article or page). H2 is heading number 2 and so on.  After The tile of the page H1 is the most important location to place your primary keywords. Because you can only effectively optimise your page for one or two phrases then I recommend to keep the Title and Heading as similar as possible, both containing your primary keywords identified in step 2.

5. Image Alt attribute: The alt attribute is meant to be used as an alternative text if the image is not available. In some browser also if you hover over the image the text that pops up is the alt text. Search Engines can not interpret an image, Instead they look at the alt text behind the image. For the alt text you want use your primary keywords and any related keywords that describe the image.

6. Valid and error free HTML: Search engines like Google like it when the HTML code behind your web pages are clean and written according to recommended standards. After all a search engine is only a computer program that needs to understand the HTML of your page and try to make sense of it, hence the easier it is to interpret the better. A good way to check that your web pages are developed according to best practices is to use the W3C validator. The fewer error the better. In fact you need to aim for error free if you are serious about SEO and high ranking.

7. Avoid flash: Ok so yes flash can look good but if we are talking SEO and good ranking in search engines then this is a bit of show stopper. Flash can work if it is only used as part of a HTML site. In other words don’t build the whole site in flash if you are serious about SEO. It’s ok if you want to use some flash elements such as animation or video, but if you build the whole site in flash then your chances of being found by Google and other engines is much decreased.

8. Links within your site: The Google engine (a.k.a. Google robot) loves finding pages by crawling from one link to the other. In fact this is how it finds pages on the World Wide Web. So this is where a well designed site navigation is helpful. Try to use a simple and logical navigation and create a good number of internal linking between your related pages. If you have a large site with many pages (for example an e-commerce website) then I would also recommend to set up two site indexes, one for the readers (HTML site index) and one for the search engines (XML site index). There are inexpensive tools like CoffeCup SiteMapper that helps you create site maps automatically.

9. The text of your links – Anchor text: Anchor text is the blue underline text you click on to navigate to another page. Always use descriptive keywords in your anchor text. Google crawls from one link to the other and one way it can tell what type of content you are linking to is by reading the anchor text.

10. Back-links: now that you have a well designed and well built website with compelling content and all the right keywords in all the right places, it is time to spread the word about your site. You want to let others know about your site and ask them to link to your site. These types of links are also referred to as back-links or in-links.

Link building is a huge and time consuming area in its own right where a lot of creativity is needed, hence I am not going into details here. But the quickest way to get started is to list your site in reliable manually moderated directories. Note the distinction I made here about being manually moderated and reliable. This is because there are many low quality and spamy directories out there which I wouldn’t recommend to use. They will add no value to your ranking and might even harm your credentials. A few well known and reliable directories I would recommend are http://www.freeindex.co.uk, http://www.ezilon.com , www.dmoz.org and the Yahoo Directory. These are all manually moderated directories that search engines like and would bother to attach any value to. There are many more sector specific directories which I use for my clients. But remember what I always recommend to my clients is that the number of links from directories should only make up a small percentage of the overall link profile.

What’s next?

I will be posting more articles about link-building and social media in the next few weeks. In particular social media is an area I am passionate about and the opportunities there are endless, if you are ready to invest the time and you are sociable enough! So make sure you follow me on twitter or subscribe to my posts using the RSS or email subscription options in the top right part of my blog.

Final Thought

Whether you employ a SEO specialist or decide to do it all yourself, a well executed online marketing campaign will help create awareness and increase your website’s visibility. In terms of when it is the right time for you to hire an SEO specialist and what to look for, the best tip I can give you is to read the SEO guidelines provide by Google

1. Top 10 SEO myths revealed
2. What is SEO?
3. Hype or reality: How is real time search affecting SEO?
4. Keyword Research 101
5. 5 Ways to speed up the performance of your website

Tagged as: basics, SEO, tips, top

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