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Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be an expensive exercise in terms of both time and money if you do not have a definitive plan of what to do and what not to do. We are talking here about improving the natural or organic ranking in this article.
The best SEO strategies involve staying away from activities that could adversely affect your search engine rankings or worse that can get your website banned by Google and any other search engiens.
Do you need to improve your search engine rankings? If so (and who doesn't?), here are 10 SEO tips to help you on your way:
- Thoroughly research potential keywords. The main purpose of organic SEO is to get increase relevant and targeted traffic for all the right keywords. As SEO can take lots of effort, and sometimes money, you should have a clear idea right from the start as to what keywords you want to target. There are a number of tools readily available on the Internet, even Google has a free too for choosing keywords.
- Target key phrases. These will have lower volumes of traffic, but in total add up to a sizeable amount of business. By their very nature they will also have low levels of completion making it easier and quicker for you to achieve higher search engine rankings and get your SEO campaign of to a good start.
- Relevant content. Relevant content makes your website information-rich; if the site provides meaningful information people will come back to it; increases your keyword density; it makes your website link-worthy and fetches you high-value inbound links. Updating your website with new relevant content should form part of any good long term SEO strategy.
- Unique titles for every page. Titles are used by the search engines to both rank and display pages. Leveraging your page titles will increase your rankings and search engine traffic.
- Unique description for each page. Your description Meta tag should describe your page in one or two sentences, and of course include your keywords. For more details go to www.sitemap-makers.com . Like the title your description also appears on the search engine results pages and as searchers often click links after reading the description your page description should obviously be as compelling as possible.
- Keep the important content near the top. Content at the top of the page is considered more important than the content below, so ensure your keywords are near the top.
- Use semantic HTML where possible. Ensure you use semantic HTML and that your keywords appear within the heading tags H1 through to H6.
- Use search engine friendly URLs. Try not to use dynamically generated URLs, instead use search engine friendly URLs. We know the problems of this as meeting this requirement means potentially compromising your existing branding.
- Create a sitemap and keep it up to date. A sitemap should be a separate web page containing links to all your web pages you want indexed by the search engine crawlers.
- Online directories. Having entries in directories like DMOZ and Yahoo! (it's the original directory) can enhance your search engine rankings if your link gets included in them.
