Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an activity you can definitely not put in the back burners. The moment you have your website up and running you should start focusing on your SEO efforts and in fact, on-page SEO should always dominate your thinking even when you are designing and developing your website. Here are a few quick tips to give a boost to your SEO efforts and fetch you quality traffic from the search engines:

Have great content

Your website content is the foremost element that affects your search engine rankings once the search engines start noticing your website. After all people come to your website to consume content, in whatever form it exists. Have quality content on your website and have plenty of it.

Do proper keyword research before developing your content

It helps you generate better content if you know what keywords you want to focus on. If after generating scores, or worse, hundreds of pages, you realise that you haven’t optimised your content for the right keywords you’ll need a major revamp, incurring you lots of expense, effort, and of course business loss. There are lots of free and commercial research tools available on the Internet that you can use to find the right keywords for your website.

Create SEO-friendly URLs

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-keywords-here.html is an SEO-friendly URL but http://www.yourdomain.com/page2.html is not. Although it is not necessary — it does help sometimes — to have your keywords in your domain name, the search engines do look for your keywords in your URL. Also, some people don’t insert their own anchor text and post your hyperlinked URL as it is, so even in that case your keywords automatically appear as the anchor text of an inbound link.

Use proper anchor texts in internal linking

Internal linking is very important because it creates a web of links under your domain and when the bots visit your website there is a less chance of any link being left uncrawled. Use your keywords and key phrases as anchor texts so the search engines know, one, that these keywords are important to warrant a dedicated link, and two, what is the context of the pages they are leading to.

Blog regularly

Blogging is not just an activity these days, it’s a necessity. It helps you build a dedicated community around your field. From an SEO point of view, most blog posts, if well-written, are very quickly indexed by the search engines. If you stick to your niche and write regularly, you soon begin to rank higher for your keywords. Once your blog is ranked higher, your business link on your blog too will get the benefit of being linked by a highly ranked website

Get links from other websites

Do not just depend on the search engines to get traffic: include other websites in your SEO strategy too. This will not only send you quality traffic from those websites, it’ll also give you an SEO boost, provided those websites are “respected” by the search engines. Make sure the incoming links from these websites carry your keywords as anchor text. Also try to see that all incoming links are voluntary, that they are there due to the overall quality of your content.

Commit yourself and be patient

SEO is a long drawn battle if you haven’t got hundreds of thousands of bucks to spend on it. It’s a slow process and the more attention you pay to the smaller things, the better are your chances of getting ranked higher by the search engines.

Submit to online directories To Boost Your SEO

Submitting to online directories is a great way to boost your SEO because most of these directories — some standard one, not all — are respected by the search engines in their respective fields. In June this year I wrote about how important it is to submit your website to online directories. Online directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ are human-edited directories and hence websites included in these directories are considered thoroughly validated by the search engines.

Use your keywords in the heading tags

Some SEO experts these days attach less importance to heading tags because there are many who exploit them, but I think they are the best of way of summing your web page content both to the readers and the search engines. The keywords in the heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) tell the search engines that these keywords really matter to your web page and hence this web page should be ranked higher for these keywords.

Use Your Keywords in the Page Title

Actually this is one of the most important things you can do to boost your SEO. Many websites I have seen appear on the first page of the SERPs (search engine result pages) simply because they have the right keywords in their page titles. The keywords in your page title tell the search engines exactly what that particular page contains.

Keep Your Documents Updated

The search engines love new content. The more you add, the more you modify, with greater frequency they crawl your website. Continuously keep adding newer pages to your website and keep updating the existing pages. This not only gives the search engines more pages to index it also conveys to them that yours is a highly active, and evolving website.

Maintain a Sitemap

A sitemap is a page containing links to all your major sections and pages. It’s kind of a linking roadmap that tells both your human visitors and the search engine crawlers what all is there on your website. In fact a sitemap saves the search engine crawlers lots of time because very quickly they can access all your links. On a second thought, why do you want to help the search engine crawlers save time? This is because they allocate only a certain amount of crawling time to a website and within that time if they cannot index your important pages you lose some great opportunities of appearing on the search engine result pages.

Keep Your Markup Clean

Clean, error-free source code makes it easier for the search engines to go through your web pages. Use the W3C Markup Validation Service to make sure that your markup complies with the latest web design standards. A website with clean markup loads fast, it is mostly accessible to all the standard browsers, and doesn’t create hurdles for the crawlers

So these are a few tips for the time being and I’m sure that in future I’ll be sharing with you guys/girls some more quick tips to boost your SEO.

Labels: Seo, Seo Tip

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