SEO Tips and Tricks for Powerful SEO

SEO tips and tricks you should and should not be doing on your Web pages to make them rank higher in search engines. This list looks at more than just meta tags and the basics of SEO, so even if you've got some of the factors, you may not have everything. Scroll to the end of the list to look at the things you should never be doing, as well as the things you should always do at the beginning.

High Priority
Medium Priority
Low Priority
Avoid
Avoid or Get Banned

Write great content (HIGH PRIORITY)

Great content is where it all starts. You can have all the keywords in the world, but if your content is no good, people won't stick around on your site and search engines won't find your site valuable

Write unique content (HIGH PRIORITY)

Unique content is important too. You need to provide content that has different information than what is on other sites and other Web pages.

Add new content all the time (HIGH PRIORITY)

Sites that have new content added on a regular basis are seen as more reliable than sites that rarely do. This also helps you to increase the amount of relevant content on your site, which also improves your rankings.

Create a great keyword phrase (HIGH PRIORITY)

The first thing you should do when working on search engine optimization is find a great keyword phrase for that page. You shouldn't try to optimize your entire site to one keyword phrase - instead focus on writing pages for specific keywords and phrases.

Choose a phrase that is popular, but not too popular (HIGH PRIORITY)

When trying to decide on a keyword phrase, you want to find one that is popular but not extremely popular. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the reality is that extremely popular keywords are very desirable and so very competitive. It's better to try to optimize for keywords that you can rank higher. You'll get more pageviews from a less popular keyword when you're on the first or second page of the search engines, than from a super popular keyword that you only make it to page 50 of search engines.

Write an accessible site (HIGH PRIORITY)

Accessible HTML is accessible to both search engine spiders and screen readers. The more accessible you make your pages, the easier it will be for search engines to read and rank your pages.

Use the keyword phrase in your title tag (HIGH PRIORITY)

The title tag is one of the most important tags on your Web page. And placing your keyword phrase in the title tag, preferably at the beginning, is very important to get that phrase into the search engines. Plus, that puts your keyword phrase as the link in the search engine index.

Get a domain with your keyword phrase (HIGH PRIORITY)

Putting your keyword phrase in your domain name is a great way to optimize for that phrase.

Use the keyword phrase in your URL (HIGH PRIORITY)

Even if you can't get your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URLs. Search engines read the URLs and assign value to the text they find there.

Use your keyword phrase a lot, but not too much (HIGH PRIORITY)

The ratio of your keywords to the rest of the text on your page is called the keyword density. It's important to repeat your keywords in your document, but not too much. Keyword density should be between 3 and 7% for your primary keyword phrase and 1-2% for any secondary keywords or keyword phrases.

Use your keyword phrase in headlines (HIGH PRIORITY)

Headline tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.) are a great place to use your keyword phrase and secondary keywords. Search engines recognize that headlines are more important than the surrounding text, and so assign greater value to keywords found there.

Use your keyword phrase in anchor text of links (HIGH PRIORITY)

Link text is another great place to put your keyword phrase. Links stand out on most Web pages, and so are given higher priority than surrounding text.

Ask other people for links to your page (HIGH PRIORITY)

A great way to get inbound links is to simply ask for them. But remember that excessive cross-linking can be viewed as spammy, so be careful about trading links or otherwise buying links on external sites.

Try to get your keyword phrase inside incoming links (HIGH PRIORITY)

Inbound links are a great way to improve your page rank. But you can't really control how people link to your pages. Chances are they won't use a phrase that has anything even remotely close to your keyword phrase. Remember that they are doing you a favor by linking to you. If it makes sense, you can ask them to change the text of the link, but be careful, as people can be very touchy, and you might just get your link removed.
Another way to get your keyword phrase in inbound links is to provide your customers with the link text ready-made. For example:

Please link to this page: <a href="http://webdesign.about.com/od/seo/tp/seo_tips_and_tricks.htm">SEO Tips and Tricks</a>

Try to get links from reputable sites (HIGH PRIORITY)

Reputable sites that link to you will increase your reputation. After all, if a reputable site feels that your site is valuable enough to link to, that means that your page has more value. You can tell if a site is considered reputable both by how high it appears in search engines and it's Google PageRank. Also, .edu sites have a higher reputation because they represent schools and universities.

Try to get links from similar sites (HIGH PRIORITY)

Inbound links from sites similar to your own are important as well. This indicates that your site does have content related to that topic. Plus, it indicates that your competition finds your site valuable, and that gives your site more credibility.

Try to get links from .edu, and .gov sites (HIGH PRIORITY)

Sites that are on .edu and .gov top-level domains have a large amount of credibility because they are very difficult to get. So if you can get the designers of those sites to link to you, that gives your site more credibility as well.

Create as much content as you can (MEDIUM PRIORITY)

Content is king. The more content you have on your site, the more there is to be indexed and appear in search engines.

Keep your site content inside one theme (MEDIUM PRIORITY)

The theme or topic of your entire site is important as well. If you have a lot of pages all around one basic theme, that will lend more credibility to each page that follows that same theme.

Keep your site live as long as possible (MEDIUM PRIORITY)

Older pages (at the same domain) will rank higher than newer ones.

Monday, September 26, 2011