Are you buried in the search engines? Are visitors having a difficult time finding your website? Or maybe you’re not even listed in the search engines. Maybe you’ve heard about search engine optimization but not exactly sure where to start. These search engine tips will give you a good starting point to get your site noticed on the major search engines. Much of the SEO involves changes on a regular and constant basis but these tips are timeless and will provide you with a solid search engine optimization framework for your website.

1. Choose Your Keywords Wisely: Before you start your SEO strategy, you must first pick keywords and keyword phrases that relate to the core of your site. You must be careful in choosing your keywords as competition is fierce in many industries.For example, it will be much easier for a website to get ranked higher in the search engines with the keyword phrase, “arizona used car dealers” than it would be for the keyword phrase “car dealers”. The more specific your search terms are, the easier it will be to get ranked higher for those terms. We obviously know that there are many more “car dealers” listed than “arizona used car dealers”. Right now there are over 18,000,000 results for “car dealers” on Google and there are only a bit over 1,000,000 for “arizona used car dealers”. Focus your keywords and keyword phrases.
2. Content Is King: No matter how many times we say this, content is the key to your websites success. If you don’t have quality and unique content, why would visitors want to come to your site? Write unique copy for your website and write it as often as you can. The search engines love fresh content. They will reward you time and time again if you feed it to them on a regular basis.
3. Link Building Strategies: This is arguable the most important aspect of search engine optimization. It’s essential that you have other sites point to your website with a link. There are right ways and wrong ways to create a link building campaign. The wrong way is to just have any and every website out there link to you. This will do no good and you could be penalized or possibly banned from the search engines. Also, it doesn’t do much good to have another website link to you with the incorrect anchor text that doesn’t relate to your website. Anchor text is the link that the other website is using in order to direct people to your website. For example, if you have a site about dogs and someone is linking to you using the anchor text “animals”, then this is not going to be very relevant. You ideally want someone to link to you using the keyword “dogs” or a related term such as “big dogs”.Also, when creating a link building strategy try and get people to link to you without having you link back to them. This shows that someone is linking to you on their own will and that your website has relevant information and content. If it’s a reciprocal link, the search engines think that the link trade was done as a deal and that the websites involved might not actually be that important. If you provide relevant and unique content as described in Tip 2, people will want to link to you on their own.
4. Customize Your Title Tags: Title tags are the little phrases and terms located in the top left of your browser window such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. The search engines love title tags that are customized for each page of the website. So, if you have a website that is 5 pages, you would create a custom title tag for each individual page relating to the content on that page.For example, if you are writing about dogs and have 5 different web pages about different dogs, you would write a new title tag for each page. The title tag on the page about Labradors could be something like: “Labrador Retrievers are great pets”. The title tag on the page about Westies could be: “Westies are a great breed full of energy”. Try to use your main keywords for each page in the title tags. The search engines love to read the title tags to find out the relevancy of that specific page. Don’t bury yourself deep in the search engines by not having customized and relevant title tags for your website.
5. Create A Sitemap:Create both a human readable and an XML sitemap for your site. The human readable sitemap will allow users to see every page on your site within one page. The XML sitemap will tell the major search engines when you update your website with content or make changes. Both are important and should be added into your search engine optimization strategy.
6. Internal Linking Strategies: As we discussed earlier, link building campaigns are essential in creating a popular website for the search engines. This also holds true for linking within your own website to other pages on your website. For example, you could link from your homepage to an article that is deeper within your website. This is a great strategy and should be used to create interlinking between pages.
7. Keep Your Coding Clean: When you are programming your website, be sure to keep you code clean. The search engine spiders need to be able to get to the actual content on your site and if the code is messy and not organized the spiders will have a hard time finding that unique content and they might leave the page before they spider it. When possible, use external .css and .js files and link them to the pages that need the code.
8. Web Page Structure: When you are creating each individual page of your website be sure to be consistent in setting up the structure of the page. This includes a website template that is the same for all pages, page headings such as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 tags, using bold tags and having a consistent navigation menu that is easy for users. If your website is set up with no rhyme nor reason, you will lose visitors due to sloppiness of the pages. Keep everything clean and organized and your visitors will come back for more…..that is, if you follow Tip 2 and provide unique content on a regular basis!
9. Submit Your Site To Relevant Directories and Search Engines: Make sure you submit your website to all relevant directories such as Yahoo and all major search engines such as Google and MSN. There are many others but these are the main players. If you’d like to find more, do a search on Google. Also, before you submit your site to these directories and search engines, make sure your website is 100% complete. Don’t submit a site that is under construction or needs more work. The search engine spiders don’t like sites that are not up and running 100%.
10. Create Your Website For The Visitors, Not The Search Engines: While it is very important to execute an SEO strategy, it’s also very important to not go overboard implementing SEO tactics. Make sure your site is developed with the user in mind. If it doesn’t make sense to your visitors, the what’s the point in having it ranked high in the search engines? Always please your visitors first and the search engines second.

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