What are your top 3 - 5 SEO tips?
We're working on improving our website. We're using WordPress with the "All in One SEO Pack" plugin. But I have very limited knowledge on this topic. I'm interested in hearing what your top SEO tips are.
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@John Yes, this is a really old question. I wouldn't ask this same question today. Unfortunately, we're told not to migrate really old questions, so I don't think it would be appropriate. It's a nice thought though. – Zuly Gonzalez 12 years ago
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@John Please, if you have a question about something, by all means ask. We are all here to learn from each other. I don't think many oldtimers know that really old questions aren't supposed to be migrated either, so it was a good question to ask. We have a lot of these really old questions that aren't really great fits for the SE engine, but I haven't found a good solution for handling them as a group. Depending on the content, some may be edited, closed, or left alone (migrations are out), so don't feel like you are interfering. – Zuly Gonzalez 12 years ago
9 Answers
NB: There is much more that can be said about this. I'll try to keep this post short, and on the things beginners can do and get a high Return-On-Investment from.
- If you don't know that much about SEO, then use a CMS with the page level best-practices already baked in. Don't spend time fiddling with the finer points of HTML, good CMS's will output fine and fully semantically valid HTML for you and save you a lot of time. Wordpress 2.9 with a few plugins, and the Wordpress 3.0 beta are good choices. Dharmesh Shah works on Hubspot.com, which has a much richer SEO feature set. There are many many CMS's available that handle standard page-level SEO correctly; it shouldn't be hard to find one that fits your needs.
- Research your keywords. Use Google Keyword Tool or some of the paid offerings to research which keywords to optimize for. Don't blindly try to rank high for single-word keywords or two-word phrases that are highly competitive; at least not in the beginning. Within reason, optimize for your chosen keywords in your URLs, body text, and inbound links.
- Build links constantly. Continuously work on building inbound links (preferably ones that match the keywords you're targeting) from reputable sources. This is were much of the ongoing hard work lies.
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Thanks for the pointers. I've got number 1 down. Number 3 is a tough one that takes time, but I'll keep working on it. – Zuly Gonzalez 14 years ago
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@Zuly Gonzalez: Sounds good. But how about #2 ? Are you perhaps trying to rank for keywords which you don't have a chance at? You won't know until you research it and get some data... – Jesper Mortensen 14 years ago
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I was neglecting #2. We did an initial keyword search at the beginning, but didn't spend too much time on it. I think we have been focusing on keywords that are too competitive for us right now. So for me, that was the best piece of advice/tip. Thanks. – Zuly Gonzalez 14 years ago
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Any advice about how to do #3? – B Seven 12 years ago
The most accurate and useful summary I've ever read is here: 15 Minute SEO Also see this prior discussion on the topic.
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Keith, thanks for the link. There's a lot of useful information on that page. I had previously read the other discussion you linked to, but it's a good idea to have it linked here anyways...Thanks. – Zuly Gonzalez 14 years ago
- Learn as much as you can about SEO before you create your first page. SEO effects the design of each and every web page.
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Validate the HTML and CSS code on each and every page. If it doesn't validate there is something wrong with your code an that means the page will not display the same way in different browsers. It also means search engines may not be able to parse the page.
y you get caughy - Google now takes page load time into account for search rankings. The more junk you put on the page, the slower it loads, and the lower your ranking (compared to the same page with a faster load time).
- There are plenty of online tools that will help you optimize your web pages for search. Use them, but don't follow them blindly.
- Write the text on your web pages for your customers, not the search engines.
- Don't use any "black hat" SEO techniques. The best they can do is temporarily boost your position a bit. Eventually you get caught. The worst they can do is get you removed from a search engine. It doesn't seem worth the risk.
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Hi Gary - I like the advice you've given, but I'd add that page load time was stated by Google to be "used in fewer than 1% of all queries" and that when used, it's only 1 of 200+ ranking elements. While there's still tons of great user-based reasons to make fast loading pages, I wouldn't put page speed in the top 3-5 tips personally. Also - HTML validation is something Google's reps have talked a lot about and noted they don't care much about at all. Having code that works/loads is important, but W3C validation simply doesn't impact rankings. – Randfish 14 years ago
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Thanks Gary. Can you give a couple of examples of some of the online tools for optimization? – Zuly Gonzalez 14 years ago
Tip #1 - Get lots of inbound links to your site. Be sure they're "dofollow" links. Links from pageranked pages are always best. IMO, one of the best sources for inbound links are guest posting on others' blogs.
Tip #2 - Target a specific keywork or phrase. Use the keyword in your domain name, title tag, header (h1) tag, and several times through the text content. Also include the keyword in the footer. When you create anchor text (blue links) into your page - use the keyword as your anchor text.
Tip #3 - Taxt is king in the world of SEO. Flash content, videos, and graphics are fun bells and whistles, but they don't win you great points in terms of SEO. Make sure each page in your site has lots of good old fashioned text. Google's spiders categorizes your site's content and ranks its usefulness based on the words it sees - so give google 500 or more words of original content on each page.
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Tip #3 is a good one that hasn't been mentioned yet. Your comment about dofollow links is also important. Blindly putting links out there may not get you much. Thanks for contributing! – Zuly Gonzalez 14 years ago
Not sure if you're still interested in this topic. Here's something I just stumbled upon the other day:
http://www.woorank.com/ Provides clear analysis on what needs improvement and what is done well. Alexa is trying to sell this sort of site analysis for $200.
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I'm always interested in this topic...it's an ongoing battle :-) Thanks for the link. What a great resource! – Zuly Gonzalez 14 years ago
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Indeed, it is quite nice. And the best thing is that it does not cache results but will allow you to run the test as many times as needed. Just for fun of it I increased my score but nearly 5 points while following couple simple recommendations. – Usabilitest 14 years ago
The 3 items below are very, very basic but so far it has worked pretty well for my blog:
- Use descriptive words in Title tags using the H tags.
- Content, content, lots of it.
- Get your links to your site in well-known sites, a way of doing this is by leaving comments in blogs using your name and a URL to your site - Google likes to see links to your site in other sites.
SEO is basically done so that your page ranks higher in Google search results. Let me tell you a secret - about 75% weightage is given to how many page link to your site (inbound) and only 25% is on what your site contains.
Inbound links:
If you have an embeddable code / blog widget, etc, ask your friends to put it up in their blog.On the website
Lets say your product deals with recruitment, when someone links to your product ask them to link something like this - "My friend runs a recruitment company and it's..." This helps Google understand that your website has got to do something on recruitment space
If an inbound link comes from a site that has higher credibility, your rank is going to increase. Use sites like linkedin where it asks for your Personal Blog / Personal Website, etc. Change the text to suit what your product is into and provide a hyperlink to your website. For eg: My company focuses on Recruitment Tests and you can see the change I made here -> http://in.linkedin.com/in/vivekravisankar. Google values it higher since it's an inbound link that comes from Linkedin
Well, you can do a number of things, but again try to be natural.
Title of the page is key. Use KeyWord External Tool to determine the competition of a keyword and appropriately put it up. The h1 tag in your page should match with the title and also be relevant to the content.My primary reason is to talk about the value of Inbound links. Hope you found it useful
Content is king, get more things done on your site.
Lots of good tips here, but one that hasn't been mentioned is blogging. Having a blog on your company site and writing at least one 300 word post each week is a good practice in addition to these tips. If you're using Wordpress, you've probably already got a blog, but I just wanted to chime in with that tip, in case folks didn't have one.
Building backlinks is important, but good on-page SEO is extremely important as well. Also, don't use automated programs to do the SEO for you. Nothing can replace a human when it comes to SEO. Tools are just that. Tools. They are good for research, they are not good when it comes to doing the actual SEO.
