Since a sites ranking is one of the biggest factor in driving free traffic to your content sites or blogs, optimizing a site to get maximum search engine exposure is an increasingly important factor in any marketing effort.

Search engine optimization, or “SEO,” means using technical and not-so-technical techniques to make sure that people searching for topics you write about will find your site.

After getting some great tips from a few site managers I know and doing additional research online I was able to improve the SEO for my site. I was able to distill these tips into some basics that are important to any site that wants a larger share of search engine traffic.

Many sites just starting up would have to focus more than I do on getting incoming links, which is how Google ranks sites (more inbound links = more authority).

Remember that you shouldn’t go overboard with SEO motivated site changes. If you start creating dummy pages with incoming links with the idea of boosting your sites exposure for a certain keyword, you will end up with a lower page rank once Google realizes what you’re doing.

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 tend to put more weight on keywords earlier in the page title. One fallout of having these keyword-filled headlines is that you can’t be as creative as 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.

4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated. If you grab the first sentence or use the same meta-description on every page, it’s nowhere near as relevant as the description that Google can pull itself from your site, so, if your description is the same on all the pages, you are better off removing it and letting Google auto-generate it.

5. Highlight your best content on every page. One feature that is common on major news sites is a list of “Most Popular Stories” or “Most Emailed Stories.” Having that list in a prominent place on your site, on all pages, would bring more traffic (and inbound links) to your site’s best content, and serve as an entree into the site for people who just came to read one 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.

About the Author:

Founder and actual CEO, Ricardo d’Argence has been in the field for more than 20 years. Alojate.com is now one of the biggest web hosting providers in Mexico, offering a range of solutions for all business needs. Dedicated servers, SEO, factura electronica, web hosting & registro de dominios.

Rate This Article:  (No Ratings Yet)

 Loading …

Popularity: 1% [?]