Top 15 tips for website SEO

In a rush to do SEO for your favorite website. You are at the right place ! I wont be taking a lot of time and make you go through all the grind of reading hundreds of pages and leave you confused even after that wondering what to do next. Below are top 10 tips for your website SEO - Follow them or forget ranking on search engines (Note that this article covers what are the things you must do at your website for SEO and not about link building, social media SEO strategies etc) :-

1) Keyword Analysis - Once you know what are the keywords most searched for in your domain you are all set to change your site to be SEO friendly.

2) Website Title - One of the most important meta tag search engines look at. Make sure you use some of the exact phrases you identified in the keyword analysis that were searched the most. Google shows 67 characters, while Yahoo shows 75. For keyword relevancy 80 characters are considered - So make sure you have the title till 80 (dont go over that). Use all exact phrases that best match the content of your page (dont use a phrase just because its searched more - your content should match it as well). Its always a good idea to put your website name at the end of title - this ensures brand recognition. Seperate your brand name from title by a pipe symbol - ”
3) Website Description - Another very important meta tag now being used heavily by google to identify relevancy of the content to the search phrase. Description is important for two reasons - one for search engines and another for users - this is what they se when they search for you. The brief description that appears when you appear in search results is this. If you try to make this piece of text only for search engines you will see a very low click through on your search resultsyou may come higher up on search results for a while though but you will lose in longer as run as search engines push you back if they see that you have a low click through when user was presented your link in search results. Ensure that you write a great description with a call to action to user on what he will find when he clicks the link. Try to squeeze in as many keywords as you can in gramatically correct form. Ensure that your brand name(site name) is introduced in first sentence of description - Brings about brand affinity in users. Trust me you will gain in longer run with the branding spreading across users. Description should be maximum of 255 characters. Google shows 150 characters while yahoo shows 250.

4) Fix URLs in your site, Make them search friendly - Have short sweet tidy URL. All URL’s should be static. A url of the form http://www.somesite.com/?pageType=carModels&brand=Honda&model=honda_city_zx is a BAD URL. Make the URLs static for eg http://www.cardekho.com/carmodels/Honda/Honda_City_ZX is a much better URL and easy for search engines to not only crawl but give some points on the relevancy of the URL as it contains the keywords that user will search “honda city car models” on. Change the _ to - in the URLs you build(this example is not the perfect one). Search engines like ‘-’ more and treat the words separeted by - as sepaprate words.

5) No Content Duplication - Under no circumstances should content of two pages on your site be same meaning no two static URLs should ever point to same content. Search Engines have tough time ranking your page as both the pages on your site compete against each other(Now you thought search engines would be smart :))

6) No Title, Description, Keywords Duplication - None of the pages on your site should have same title, description or keywords. If they do they are going to compete against each other.

7) Add Keywords - Now add all those keywords you found which are relevant to the page you are putting them on. Limit your keywords size to 150 characters. Dont go over that or search engines might think of you as spam. Dont repeat keywords again and again. Try avoiding usage of same phrase in part more than a couple of times.
Add H1 tag - Add a H1 tag preferably towards the top of page and same as your title of page.

9) Add multiple H2 tags - try repeating some of the keywords in description or title in you H2 tags. Break the content in your page in such a manner that the important keywords appear in H2 tags. Try introducing these in upper half of your page.

10) Linking your own pages - Make sure you link all your important pages from atleast 8 different pages in your site. While linking use appropriate text for the link preferably same as title of page (or atleast having important keyword from the title tag). This has a big impact. Dont have more than 100 links on your page.

11) New pages link on homepage - For getting your new pages indexed introduce a link on homepage to them for sometime.

12) Alt tag on images - All images must have alt tags which best describe the image (and preferably have keywords you are targetting your page on).

13) Outbound links - Give only quality outbound links on your site. Dong fall in trap of link exchange by putting links on your home page to spammy sites. it will only harm your ranking in longer run. For any outbound link you dont want to pass on the link juice use the “nofollow” attribute in the anchor tag.

14) Breadcrumb - Have a bread crumb on every page of your site. Breadcrumb is also helpful to usres for navigation purpose and for search engines to move back the hierarchy and give link juice to trailing pages.

15) Add a site map page and submit it - Have all your links placed in a tree structure (just like you bread crumb organization) on the site map. Add this page and give link in footer header. Also submit your site map to google, yahoo, msn.