When it comes to SEO, there is a wealth of information out there that can be found on how to optimize a website for search engines. But how does on know what they read is not outdated, or that the techniques are not dishonest, black-hat practices that could get their site banned? Well let us help. We have a few seo tips that are white-hat techniques and are what works well today.

SEO Tip 1. Evaluate your website. How does it score with the search engines. Website Grader from HubSpot offers a neat little tool that can tell you how your site scores currently.

SEO Tip 2. Check your titles in the pages of your website. Search Engines place a lot of weight on the titles alone. So make sure that the titles include keywords, are descriptive to the page content, sound natural to the reader, and are no longer than 73 characters in length total.

SEO Tip 3. Meta Descriptions. Don’t creat a page without them. Google does still rely on them like many SE’s. Though they are not very strongly considered for placement in the search results, they are what is important for human readers to understand while sifting through the sea of links in their search results. Descriptions are most often used when someone performs a search specific to your domain name. Keep the character count to less than 150 total.

SEO Tip 4. Use heading tags. <h1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 tags in your page that include words from your title and description. Like headlines in a newspaper, heading tags are important for your page content also as an introduction as to what is to come next. Only use an <h1> tag one time, and feel free to use <h2 and below a few times if needed. Never make heading tags to appear as normal text through style and css commands.

SEO Tip 5. Rich content. If you have little tect content on your site, then expect very few visits. Search engines scan the web for text content. So make sure that there is plenty on your site that is relevant to the title, description, and header tags.

SEO Tip 6. Updates. Keep the information fresh on your site. It could almost become a full time job, but if you want serious visits, then get to writing. make only 1 to a few new pages per day or include new content on, say for example: the homepage every day to 1 time per week at a minimum. Search Engines thrive on fresh content and give fresh content a chance to show up in the search results right away as a test to see if searchers visit your website and find the information useful. If enough people continue to visit the new page, it will continue to move up in the search results and keep a strong position. Oh yeah, Google does track user behavior far beyond what you would think.

SEO Tip 7. Internal linking. Creating quality internal links is extremely important. Especially for new sites. It amazes me that some websites don’t show up in the number one spot for all the words in their domain name. The secret to having a good domain name and ranking high in the search results with it, is to use an anchor link with the words in it that points to your homepage. Like Area Web Solutions.

Beyond that, you need to do this for the other pages of your site. Linking a site with the anchor words, “Home, About, Contact and etc”, have zero ranking power for your site. Though these links may be important for the pages they point to, make sure that you use key words that users might search in the search engines in the links that point to those pages.

Make sure that the page you are linking from and going to, has everything to do with the keyword that you are using in the link. Remember the titles, descriptions, header tags and content that we already talked about? Now you have the opportunity to make those pages bring in some real traffic by linking them with the same keywords that you already used in those areas.

SEO Tip 8. External linking. Just like internal linking, get quality links from other websites that point to yours with anchor text as well. Links to your website that look like http://www.areawebsolutions.com , will do very little for you. So try to get keywords in those links that point back to your site if you can. make sure that the keywords are relevant to the page they point to and are from a relevant page themselves.

SEO Tip 9. Blogs. Blog about your site. If you can’t control the content on your site because you paid someone else to do the work for you, then sign up at wordpress, blogger.com and others and start talking, and linking to your site like described above. Blogs are hands down the most effective way to get better rankings for your site and ultimately get more visits. If you can install a blog on your own website and set up the latest blog articles to roll every three new articles or so on all the pages of the site, and generate a quality ping list within your blog to notify the blogsphere world about your new posts, then this will yeild some powerful results.

SEO Tip 10. Moderation. More is not always better with SEO. Don’t come up with ways to create 10,000 pages a day or 10,000 new links per day. It is a complete waste because Search engines will detect the spike and manually review your site to look for black-hat, web spam tricks on your site. If they find you attempting to flood their results with half ass developed pages, ad landing pages, or anything else on their crap list, you will find all your efforts to be a complete waste to that point, because they will ban your website from ever showing up in their search engine results ever again.

These SEO tips are only 10 out of the 140 that we actually use for our clients. Call us for a free needs analysis for your business and we’ll show you how we can do all this and more for you. Call (616) 953-6185

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