DIY: Simple Website SEO Techniques

DIY – Do it yourself! Yes, as simple as that. The website optimization techniques discussed in this post are very simple to implement and can affect your website ranking in the search engine to a great extent. The changes you might do in the site may take any where between 4-6 weeks to show up in search engines.

First, a look at the quality guidelines by search engines. Failing to adhere to these guidelines can seriously damage the ranking of your website and can also drop your website from search engine listing. Some important quality guidelines are:-

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links in your pages
• Avoid duplicate content by means of several pages with similar content
• Avoid pages with irrelevant content and keywords
• Do not create pages that installs spyware, trojan or viruses
• Do not create pages just for search engines (also called doorway pages)

Let’s now look at some simple techniques to optimize your website.

• Title – Your website should have a title which must be relevant to the purpose of your website. For example, if your website is about Search Engine Optimization then a title of ‘Effective Search Engine Optimization’ is better than having ‘Get SEO here’. Ideally speaking, one title for the entire website is OK, but having a unique title for every page is even better. Make use of the title tag and put the most relevant title in it.
• Header Tags – Make effective use of header tags in your content. For the headers use the H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags as much as you can. The search engine robots give importance to header tags and it also make your content more easy to read.
• Keyword Optimization – Use keywords that most surfers will use to search in the search engines. For instance, if we want to host our website, we would search with keywords ‘website hosting’ or ‘hosting website’. If you intend to use these as your keywords then put them in your content multiple times. At least 4-5 times every 200-400 words is good enough but over usage such as stuffing the pages with keywords may penalize your site. Also use the keywords in the name of your pages, such as example.com/keyword.htm
• Site Navigation – Your navigation should and must be readable by the crawling robots (also known as spiders) so that they can effectively crawl your website and index content. If you want to use flash buttons or images for your site’s navigation, supplement it with a text link so that every page of your site is linked with at least one text link from anywhere. Also, provide a sitemap with links to all the pages in the site and put a link to your sitemap on the main page so that when a spider visits your site, it can use the sitemap and reach every page of your site.
• Images – We all know, a picture says more than a thousand words, but not for a search engine. If you must use images, then consider using ALT attribute of an IMG tag and also try to use keywords in the ALT attribute. Since a robot can not read an image, using an ALT tag can at least tell the search engine about what that image is there for.
• HTML & CSS – Use valid HTML and CSS tags. If your website is already live, considering getting your HTML validated using the w3 html validator.

I am already working on posting an article on some advanced techniques of search engine optimization. Stay tuned and I will be back with more techniques for your website.