This post on SEO tips is meant for small business owners and individuals who have an online presence for their organisation but are unable to generate consistent and relevant traffic from the search engines (namely Google, Yahoo and Bing) to further their online presence and get a measurable return on their investment.
Without a doubt getting ranked on the leading search engines for keywords which are relevant to your products or services is the most effective way to boost your online revenues. However, it is surprising how little thought and effort is being spent by most web developers and website owners in improving their rankings on the search engines. The following SEO tips should improve your search engine rankings and help you generate relevant search engine traffic from Google and others on a consistent basis.
SEO Tip #1: Check if your relevant web pages are listed on Google
The first step would be to check if Google has already indexed the pages which you are hoping would be listed on its search database. To do this you should go to Google and type in the text info: followed by the url which you want to check on the Google’s index, e.g. info:www.diadem.co.in/web-hosting/web-hosting.html. If your webpage has been indexed by Google, it would show up on the search results, otherwise, you will get a ‘Sorry, no information is available for the URL:’, which means that the Googlebot and possibly the other search engine spiders has not yet been able to index your page on their search database.
SEO Tip #2: Check for relevant keywords using the Google Keyword Tool
The next step would be to check which are the relevant keywords which people are searching for on the search engines. There are many paid tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery but I would recommend using the Google Keyword Tool if you are starting off with keyword analysis. The Google Keyword tool allows you to enter your key phrases and come up with an estimate of the Global and Local search volume for that keyword alongwith the competition index if you wish to use Adwords to get listed on the sponsored listings section for that keyword.
SEO Tip #3: Create separate ‘landing pages’ for each keyword or a group of closely linked keywords
The next important step would be to create a landing page dedicated for that keyword or a cluster of closely grouped keywords which are related to each other. In SEO parlance, such pages are known as ‘landing pages’ as they bring users from the search engines to a URL within your website which has relevant content to the users search needs and not directly to the homepage.
SEO Tip #4: Your webpage URL should contain the relevant keyword which you wish to optimise
If you are optimising your landing page for ‘tour agents in india’, your webpage url should ideally have these keywords within its url, e.g. www.yourdomain.com/tour-agents-in-india.html. If your website is based on a CMS like Joomla, use .htaccess and mod_rewrite apache modules to create SEF (search engine friendly) URLs for your webpages.
SEO Tip #5: Update every page of your website with relevant and unique metatags
Though the importance of meta description and keyword tags don’t seem to play a big role in enhancing your search engine rankings, each page of your website should have a unique meta description and meta keyword tag to ensure that search engines identify each of your pages as unique use display the meta description text below the search engine listings text.
SEO Tip #6: Images used within your landing pages should have the same name as the keyword which you intend to optimise
As the search engines cannot decipher the visually stunning graphics on your website, you need to ensure the following:
- The image name contains the keyword which you are optimising for your landing page, e.g. chennai-hotels.jpg.
- The alt text tag for the image name should also contain the desired keyword, e.g. alt=”hotels in chennai”.
SEO Tip #7: Write original SEO content which is easy to read and relevant to your target audience
Search engines are looking for original, unique content which is well written and grammatically correct so you should avoid stuffing your landing pages with keywords or having text which is poorly written.
SEO Tip #8: Limit the number of times your keyword is repeated on the body content of your page
As a thumb rule, do not repeat the keywords more then 3-4 times on the body of your page as the search engines might penalise your webpage if they consider that your page is being stuffed with the same text beyond a reasonable no. of times.
SEO Tip #9: Generate a sitemap for your website to enable search engines to index your content
Creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google using the Webmaster Tools allows Google to index your site much faster (sometimes within a few days) in comparison with waiting and hoping for the Googlebot to come over and re-index the content of your website. You can create a Google compatible XML sitemap for your website at XML-sitemaps.com, which is free and efficient.
SEO Tip #10: Check if your landing pages are indexed on Google and listed for those keywords
Once you have submitted your site through the Webmaster Tools, check back every few days if Google has indexed your landing page (use the Tip #1, stated above). After your webpage has been indexed by Google, you can check the search rankings for your page using the Free Keyword Position Checker Tool by SEOCentro. This tools allows you to enter your desired keyword, your website URL and lists the ranking of your website on the Google, MSN and Yahoo.
So there you have it, the 10 tips on SEO which is a surefire way to get your site listed and ranked on the search engines. You can repeat this process all over again for the next set of keywords which you wish to optimise for your website. There are other advanced methods to improve your rankings on the search engines and hopefully we will touch upon them in our future posts. However, the above guidelines are proven to boost SEO rankings and are used by leading SEO consultants worlwide, so you should be in good company!
Happy Rankings and feel free to post your comments to this post.
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