Search engine optimization 101:SEO First Steps
Search engine optimization has been in the internet from the beginning of the web history, by the time of altavista, lycos, excite, hotbot and others, people wanted to rank in the first positions, or at least, have a good description in the search results and a nice page title.
Now days, organic SEO (appearing in the firsts positions in a search engine) is a full time job for SEO professionals, if you want to increase your page traffic, you can hire a SEO pro, contract a SEO company to outsource. Anyway if you run a small page (under 50 Visitors/day) you should follow at least these basic recommendations for SEO:
1. Add a page title, Meta keywords, and Meta descriptions to your page?
Take a look of the source code of your home and internal pages, they should look like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>The title of your page</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”The keywords of your page“>
<meta name=”description” content=”The description that will appear in the search results“>
</head>
the body of your page
2. Title
The title is what appears on the top of your browsers. This title should have the keywords that are related to the page. Keep in mind that your title, keywords and descriptions should be unique for each one of your pages.
3. Keywords
A keyword should be a phrase of two or three keywords you think users looking for you will type into search engines. For example when looking for a search engine optimization company you might look for “SEO Miami”, “SEO Miami Company”
4. Description
Descriptions are usually 160 to 170 characters long including spaces. The descriptions gives my customers a brief introduction to what it is I actually do in my company. The key to writing a good description is having my keywords all ready defined.
5. Create a sitemap.
A sitemap is a file called sitemap.xml, this file can be generated using different SEO tools, and must be accessible to the spiders in your home page. The sitemap is a map of your website, so the spider knows where all the links are, you can use a combination of xml file and hml file sitemap.
6. Use html based websites against flash or images.
If you make a beautiful, full of colors and animations flash page this may look nice but to a web crawler this may be that you are trying to hide something or not want to show them something so search engines don’t like this. Sure you can have flash and images but written content is always better.
7. Good content
Good content is the most important fact when it comes down to search engine optimization. You should have attracting, fresh content to keep your visitors (and crawlers) coming back.
8. Internal and external linking.
Links are very important for search engine optimization, make links within your pages pointing to your page, also check your anchor texts, (anchor text is the text you use for that link) so they contain meaningful keywords.
9. H1, H2 Tags
Header tags or better known as <h1> and <h2> tags are a quick way to give style to your headers. This is a simple way to show Google a sub title or something important. They go under you main title and you should try to include your keywords in them but in a natural way.
You should have a way to track your progress, you can use SEO tools, or at least a free counter to track your page visits, location, bounce rate (users that go in and leave rite away), and others
Google offers great free tools to track these types of things.
Following these simple steps will take you closer and closer to achieving top positions.
