The 52 Top
SEO Tips – Here Are 10 of Them
By David
Leonhardt
From the obvious to the "Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before",
here are 10 of the top 52 tips on how to optimize
your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up
the search engine rankings. Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags
around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT
use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or
twice is plenty. Deep linking. Make sure you
have links coming in to as many pages as possible.
What does it tell a search engine when other web
sites are linking to different pages on your site?
That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content.
What does it tell a search engine that all your links
are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow
site of little value, or that your links were generated
by automation rather than by the value of your site.
Here is an example of deep
linking, in this case to my personal happiness
workbook. Become a foreigner. Canada and
the UK have many directories for websites of companies
based in those countries. Can you get a business
address in one of those countries? Newsletters. Offer
articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines.
The links stay live often for many years in their
archives. First come, first served. If you
must have image links in your navigation bar, include
also text links. However, make sure the text links
show up first in the source code, because search
engine robots will follow the first link they find
to any particular page. They won't follow additional
links to the same page. You can see this in action
at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring
page Multiple domains. If you have several
topics that could each support their own website,
it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First,
search engines usually list only one page per domain
for any given search, and you might warrant two.
Second, directories usually accept only home pages,
so you can get more directory listings this way.
Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops? Article
exchanges. You've heard of link exchanges, useless
as they generally are. Article exchanges are like
link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish
someone else's article on the history of pudding
pops with a link back to their site. They publish
your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in
Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both
have content. You both get high quality links. (More
on high quality links in other tips.) Titles for
links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does
this help visually impaired surfers know where you
are sending them, but some search engines figure
this into their relevancy for a page. Not anchor
text. Don't overdo the anchor text. You don't
want all your inbound links looking the same, because
that looks like automation – something Google
frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company
name other times, "Gumbo Pudding Pop" occasionally, "Get
gumbo pudding pops" as well, "Gumbo-flavored pudding
pops" some other times, etc. Site map. A big
site needs a site map, which should be linked to
from every page on the site. This will help the search
engine robots find every page with just two clicks.
A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the
navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar
at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like
a mini-site map? There you have it: 10 of the 52
Top SEO Tips, a free tip sheet that comes with Don't
Get Banned By the Search Engines:
There is a lot more to
search engine optimization, and there are always
more details when looking at an individual site.
But these tips should help any website significantly
improve its rankings.
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