Since the ranking of a site in the search engines is largely responsible for the amount of organic traffic a blog or content receives, optimizing any site to increase its search engines exposure is an important aspect of any online marketing effort.
Search engine optimization, or “SEO” is the method of applying technical and non technical techniques to a site to insure that the site appears on the list of search engine results when someone is looking for something that is featured on your site.
After doing some research online and being given some fantastic tip from other webmasters I know, I was able to greatly improve my sites SEO and I’ve distilled these tips into some basics that are essential to any content site that is looking for more traffic from the search engines.
Sites that are new and are just starting up should focus on getting incoming links. This is part of what Google uses to rank sites in the listings. Basically, more inbound links means more authority.
Also, it’s important that in seeking increased traffic, you don’t go overboard with SEO-motivated site changes: if you create dummy pages and links just to increase your site’s exposure for a particular keyword, Google will catch on and lower your ranking.
With these caveats in mind, here are some SEO tips to consider:
Get both inbound and outbound links. While Google ranks your sites importance on the number of inbound links coming from other sites, it gives much more weight to in links from authority sites.
Use headlines and title tags with the keywords up front. As you consider search engine optimization for your site, you should think about the most important keywords that people will use when searching for your site in Google.
Search engines seem to put more value on a keyword that used earlier in the page title. One drawback of using keyword filled headlines is that you aren’t able to be nearly as creative as those tabloid newspapers can be.
3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include keywords. Similarly, it’s important that the URL for each story contains the keywords from your headline and even the category for the story.
Page descriptions should be removed if they are not unique. If you use the first sentence of the article on the page or simply use the same meta-description on each page, it’s not going to be as relevant as the description that Google can extract from your site. Therefore, if your description is identical on every page you are much better of removing it and letting Google generate it on its own.
Highlight each page’s best content. One feature that is commonly used by major news sites is a list of “Most emailed Stories” or” Today’s Top Stories”. Placing this list prominently on your site, on every page, would bring more traffic as will and more inbound links to the best content on your site and would serve as an introduction to your site if a visitor came to read a specific post.
Many readers leave the site after reading only one post, if you make it easy for them to find some of your best work then they may stick around and read more or subscribe to your blog feed if they find your content compelling enough.
Limit the use of title tags and categories and use just the one that is most important. You should highlight only the important categories and put the others on a different page. Using too many tags will create a bunch of links that aren’t really useful. The best practice is to use tags for just the most important keywords.
Create a Google News sitemap and optimize any images. Google recommends that publishers submit special “sitemaps” to help the search engine easily index the sites pages. Sitemaps are dynamic XML files that you submit to Google and are used by their spider to index your content.
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