10 Basic SEO Tips Every Web Developer Should Follow
Search
Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients for getting
large amounts of traffic to your website besides high-quality content. Because
once your articles are a few weeks old, the majority of the traffic to those
articles will come from search engines. That's why it's important to rank high
in search engines.
In
this article I'm going to show you 10 basic SEO tips that you should keep in
mind when writing a new article or developing a new website to make sure your
blog ranks high in the search engines.
1. Place
Your Keywords In the Title Tag
The
title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular
keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that
contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people.
Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your
page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are
the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and
rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and
see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.
Please
keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters (about 8 words)
of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's
title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have
a page title that's too long. Source: Google – How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?
Note: Word
Press users should use the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress.
This plugin gives you the ability to easily place the title of your post in the
beginning of your <title> tag.
2. Optimize
Your Robots.txt
Having
an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages
of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who
use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling
wp-admin and plugin folders.
Take
a look at my my Robots.txt to
get an idea of how it works. Its code is pretty much self explanatory but if
you want a better understand of it take a look a links mentioned below.
Here
are some more resources about the robots.txt file:
3. Proper
Use of the ALT Attribute
The
<alt> attribute should be used to describe an image, not to spammed with
keywords that have nothing to do with the image.
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images,
they can however read the <alt> attribute, and having it spammed with
keywords that are totally irrelevant to the image will make Google aware of
what to derank you for.
Here's
some more information about the alt attribute:
4. Anchor
Text of Links
The
anchor text is the text inside your <a> tags that links to other pages.
Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text
to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even
more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link
is going.
So
avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt
both your website and the website you're linking to. One more thing to keep in
mind is to keep the characters in your anchor text under 55.
5. Quality
of Inbound and Outbound Links
While
most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your
rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to
your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for
random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a
high pagerank links
to your website in an article.
Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that
they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad
websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed
from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is
that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100
unique outbound links on a single page.
6. Proper
Use of Header Tags
<h1>,
<h2> tags etc. should be used when appropriate. Don't be using <h2>
tags as a paragraph or using <div> class="title"</div> to
display the title of your page or something.
Here's
a few things to keep in mind when using header tags:
only
use one <h1> tag per page
you
can use as many <h2> - <h6> tags as you like in your pages
Search
engine crawlers only read basic html.
More articles about
header tags:
7.
Importance of the First Paragraph
Your
first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because
it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat
of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most
important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.
If
you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the
plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place
it in the Meta description, which is the text that search engines display under
the title of your page.
8. Ensure
Your Site is Accessible
An
accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered
as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server,
validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points
are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select
other websites to visit.
Use
tools like:
To know
if your site contains broken links or when your site is down.
9. Use SEO
Friendly URLs
The
URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have
an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also
have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums
etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs
usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like
example.com/p=981489894.
Furthermore,
when using Dynamic URLs try
to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it
might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very
important (ie. have a large amount of inbound links).
More articles about SEO
Friendly URLs:
10. Site
Usability
If
your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility,
navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people
linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus
resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a
web designer to redesign your website.
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