The placement on search engines has become a critical element of any successful online marketing strategy. A well put together Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy can deliver up to 60% of an organization’s web traffic at a fraction of any marketing program.
Everybody loves a good marketing tips, and here are 10 easy SEO tips to help your website rank better without spending a lot of money to change the structure of your website.
| 1. | FLASH |
| Try to avoid using Javascript or Flash drop down navigation menu as it is not easily crawlable by search engines. A quick short term solution fix is to have a text file so that search engine are able to find the page it is linked to. Avoid flash by all means. | |
| 2. | CONTENT IS KING |
| You heard it before, and you will hear it again. Well written unique content is not only king, it is worth in gold. Don’t forget to focus on keywords, keyword phrases and fresh content to have readers coming back. | |
| 3. | QUALITY INCOMING LINKS |
| Like a popularity contest in high school, search engines views popular websites as important and is given better ranking. Popular websites are determine by the number of quality backlinks that points to your website. | |
| 4. | INTERNAL LINKS |
| Create a site architecture that humans and search engine bots are able to navigate easily. Link within your website and hyperlink keywords. Do not over complicate the website hierarchy and provide users the shortest / easiest way to the destination page. | |
| 5. | KEYWORDS |
| Use the appropriate keywords and keyword phrases in the URL, meta title, meta keyword and images. If you are able to secure a domain name with a keyword, then you have a leg up on your competitors. | |
| 6. | CANONICALIZATION |
| Check for www and non-www domains issues where the website will load with or without www. If you maintain both version of the URL, search engines will have issues determining which URL should be shown in search results. | |
| 7. | INDEX.HTML |
| Don’t confuse the search engines by having multiple main page. Just maintain http://www.yourdomain.com as opposed to http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html, or in some cases index.aspx, or default.php. Check your internal links too to make sure you don’t use “index.html” | |
| 8. | KEEP IT FRESH |
| Have your human users come back by producing relevant content, and have search engines craving more of your content. Search engine usually crawls your website for new content daily or weekly, depending on your content, but popular sites like CNN.com is crawled hourly. | |
| 9. | SOCIAL IS IN |
| Integrate your social media shares/likes, etc with your website as Google in integrating Google+ in the search results, while Bing is utilizing data from Facebook. Having a Facebook page is not only required, you need to spend time maintaining it and building a community. | |
| 10. | WEBMASTER |
| Google and Bing will provide you with tool to tell you what is wrong with your site. Search engines will provide portals to help you rank better – use it wisely. www.google.com/webmasters www.bing.com/toolbox/webmastertools |