SEO Tips

SEO Tips that will help your site reach a better ranking (aka Search Engine Optimization Cheat Sheet)

Page title (i.e. what is inside the <title></title> tag)
Pick good URLs for your articles
Titles within your content (h1 and h2 tags)
Quality content with targeted keywords and variations (keyword density 2-3%, use synonyms etc…)
First sentence is important (see Advanced concepts – Google indexing algorithm)
All HTML elements are an opportunity for keywords (alt text for images, image filenames etc…)
Hard to control, but comments with your targeted keywords can help
Meta tags (Description can end up being what appears in Google;Keywords does not seem to be used any more)

Matt Cutts answers:
Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking (video)?
Good separators(video).
Position on meta tags(video).
Importance of the URL in SEO(video).

Ensure you have About/Privacy/Contact pages
Make the site easy to understand
Easy Navigation structure
Link to your important pages from other pages on your site, with judicious keywords (anchor text) – advanced technique
Try to pick relevant text for your outbound links (links going to other websites)
Develop a full engineered internal link structure – advanced technique

Matt Cutts answers:
The nofollow attribute of the anchor tag (video)?

Off-Site SEO Tips

Make people want to link to your content (anchor text is important but hard to control)
Submit your site to reputable directories (DMOZ …etc..)
Writing and syndicating articles with reputable entities
Participate in communities/forums (signature + post link when appropriate)
Post comments on relevant blogs when appropriate (never spam)
Link exchange (border line gray hat – do only in an “organic manner”)
Purchase links – Totally black hat unless – (see Advanced concepts – Purchase links)

Matt Cutts answers:
Matt Cutts on link building (video)?

Advanced concepts (don’t try too hard initially, first master the basics and revisit these points once the basics are “natural” to you):

Google indexing algorithm
Basically Google tries to have computers simulate how a human would analyse a page. For the most geeky or curious ones, Google seems to use a form of LSI (Latent semantic indexing). Basically, write your content (without ruining it for humans) then see if a “speed reading” of it will yield the strong emphasis you want on the theme/keywords you are targeting. This seems to favor beginning and ending of your page content and within the page content beginning and maybe ending of your sentences. This old article offers some good SEO tips and can help understand this further.
Purchasing links
Officially you should never purchase links. A more proper way to see this is purchasing advertisement space on another site. Before you ever consider this make sure the site selling ad space does not sell to just anyone. Check the current sites they are promoting and if they are too spammy stay away!
Excellent Article on Quality Content
Matt on PageRank sculpting
Matt Cutts answers: When are penalties lifted?
Matt on Picking URLs
My introduction article on SEO Basics

Leave a Reply