Basic Search Engine Optimization Tweaks and Tips
Having an overall search engine optimization strategy is important, but sometimes you’re so far over your head that you just want a few quick wins to build a base and get you rolling. Here are 6 quick SEO tweaks you can make today to improve your site and rankings.
- Focus on a small set of related keywords – Find the best words that you want your site to be known for and add in the terms your customers (or potential customers) use to describe your service. Write content relating to and focusing on that small set of keywords. 5-10 words is probably the best recipe and Google’s keyword tool is a great place to get started.
- Clean up your URL’s – Search engines like URL’s that are clear and concise. If your page URL’s look like www.mywebsite.com/?p=123, tweak your content management system so that they display more like www.mywebsite.com/category/my-amazing-post-with-keywords-in-the-title. If you’re using WordPress, here’s a guide for permalink structure.
- Use the H1 tag – H1 tags are used to define headlines. In the eyes of a search engine, text with an H1 tag looks more important than regular plain text.
- Link to other pages within your site – Use keywords in your links. A link that looks like “Creative Online Marketing Campaigns” looks much better to a search engine than “click here for my favorite post.”
- Make sure all pages have descriptive page titles – If you’re selling laptop memory, a page title that says “Laptop Memory | Computer Memory, DDR RAM, Memory Sticks and Computer Upgrades,” is much better than “Memory.” I would keep titles to about 60-80 characters
- Build a site map and make sure it gets submitted to search engines. Ensure that engines can index and find all your content. A good place to start is Google WebMaster Tools.
Bonus Tip: Write great content so other sites will link to you – inbound links are one of the most important aspects of optimizing for the web. Link bait is one thing, but truly unique and valuable content goes much further. Shoot for the latter, it has more staying power.
Share your successes in the comments below. What are those quick SEO wins that you would suggest?
