There are hundreds of different techniques to achieve higher ranking in the search results, but these basic fundamental SEO Tips have not changed for a long time now and every webmaster should implement them to achieve better Search Rankings.
Some like to refer to it as Google Optimization and I think it is simply because of a small difference in how Google, Yahoo or MSN rank websites in their search results but Google is #1 Search engine today and many other engines use Google’s index for their search results. Regardless these tips will work for all engines. Free tips below are not in any particular order of importance as they are all crucial factors in Optimizing your site for Top rankings.
Here are Top 8 most important Free SEO Tips that anyone can give you:
SEO Tip #1, Find Related Keywords
Before you even build your website you need to determine what niche or theme your website is about. Same with any other page, there’s going to be main topic for it. Once you decide on topic, you need to find keywords and phrases that relate to your theme, analyze them and pick most relevant ones but they also should be keywords in “demand”. It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that nobody is even searching for. How do you find in “demand” keywords? The most popular resources are WordTracker, KeywordCountry and KeywordElite. Using these tool’s you will be able to narrow your keywords to ones that have the highest search volume and not that many websites to compete against which is known as Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI).
SEO Tip #2, Analyze your Competition
Website linking structure and number of links pointing to your site or page is crucial to ranking High in Google and if you rank good in Google, chances are you’ll do good in Yahoo and other search engines but top 3 search engines that will bring most traffic are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Analyzing your competitors is important and included in Free SEO tips because search engines do analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria which is called Page Rank (PR).
So what other websites are doing to rank on top of search results. In order to find out you need to gather a significant amount of data about the top ranking sites for whatever keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize your page for, like:
1. Competition’s rank in the Search Engines Results for given keyword
2. The number of incoming links to the site’s home page, not including internal links.
3. What keywords they use in the title tag
4. Number of links containing keywords in the link text
5. PageRank of linking pages
6. The Alexa traffic ranking
Most of this information can be collected free by querying Google and Yahoo (Read about it in this Analyzing Individual Keyword Phrase article) and using free seo tools but it is very time consuming and you can’t get all data in one place.
I use This SEO Tool that can easily crawl a Web site and compile statistics on keyword usage throughout the site with single click of a mouse and all data is displayed in one window.
SEO Tip #3, Title Optimization
Many SEO professionals still argue over this but the page title tag element is still one of the most important factors for ranking highly in the search engines.
The title tag is displayed as the first line of text in the blue row at the top of any browsing window. Search Engine Friendly title tag is ideally 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length, straight and to the point, this is what will show up in search engine results as a link to your page. Have at least one main keyword in title tag but don’t stuff all of your keywords in it. SEO Tip: make sure your Page Title Tag is relevant to the content on the page and EVERY page should have it’s own Title tag.
(Read more and see title tag examples in this Meta tags article.)
SEO Tip #4, Meta Tags Optimization
META tags are hidden code of information in the head area of your web pages and is used to communicate with search engine spiders/crawlers. The most important META tags you need to utilize in your webpages are:
1. Description
2. Keywords
3. Robots
I personally don’t believe that sequencing of these tags in certain order is that important. Even though I see many websites put title tag after description and keywords tags lately but there is no proof that it is better for SEO.
Optimization of Description Meta tags
The effective META description tag consists of 25 to 30 words or less but using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces) or some Search Engines would not consider it Search Engine Friendly.
Optimization of Keywords Meta tags
The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself but don’t fret too much over your Keywords Meta tag, instead utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your Title Tag element, Description Meta Tag, heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Optimal Keyword Meta Tag has 15 to 20 words max. SEO Tip: Don’t repeat your keywords more than 3 times or search engine will consider it as spam of their search results and don’t include keywords that are not in the main content section of your page.
Robots Meta tag will let search engine know if you want a particular page to be or NOT be indexed or to follow or not to follow links on given page. (Read more and see robots tag examples in this Robots txt article.)
