Starting with the Basics for SEO (search engine optimization)

05/09/2014 00:28

SEO can be a very tough technique and skill to learn, knowing SEO for your website can help you achieve better rankings and know what to look for to ensure you are using proper methods to get your website ranked.

Onpage Methods

The first and most important step to start for optimizing your campaign starts at your website. Think of your website as an opportunity for every single page. Without properly optimizing your website you just make it harder to rank in Google.

Meta Tags

Your meta tags are tags that are used on each page to let search engines know what the page is about. Now days though for the most part the only tag much attention is given to is the Title tag and the GEO tag if you site is for specific areas.

Your title tag is the title of the page which should focus on what the page is about in a keyword, its best to do some keyword research to ensure you choose the right keyword for your page. Also you can add branding here in the page title. A good example would be : "Sleeveless T -Shirts  - (Brand or website here).

Content

The next part of your onpage is obviously the content, a lot of people might forget that having more content is generally better for search engine optimization. If you have a page with thin content it could likely mean that the page will have a harder time ranking. So try to give as much information as possible on your pages not only to help with "time on site" factors for analytics but also entice your readers.

Also in the content you will want to ensure to utilize "H1" tags usually only once at the beginning of the page, this can be a related keyword that you are trying to target. H2 tags can also be important and are a smaller version of text compared to H1. Remember when writing content you do not want to overuse any keywords generally less than 3% or 5% is ideal for the keyword that you are targeting onpage. You can use tools to check this density with tools like SEOquake the browser addon.

Images

Remember most sites have images and really they should have them as it makes a better user experience. Just do not forget that images also need to be optimized for search engines as they are unable to read them. Setting up your ALT tags and description tags for the image will let search engines know what the image is related to.

Site Speed

Another thing to keep in mind that will affect your SEO is the site speed. There are ways to optimize your sitespeed such as enabling caching for your images and setting expirations for them as well. If you are familiar with this there is also a good site you can check your site speed score and they give you ideas on how to improve it at GTmetrix. Not only will improving your sitespeed help with SEO it will also give your visitor's a better browsing experience.

Interlinking

Don't forget to use internal linking throughout your website, this mean use links to other areas of your site when you see it necessary. Usually this will happen naturally depending on your website layout. But this helps with users being able to browse your site and Google takes this into account as well. You always want to have somewhere no matter where you are on a site to go back to the homepage or other important areas of your website.

Offpage SEO

For the most part I will save offpage SEO for another post, once you have taken care of your onpage SEO you are ready to start promoting your website with offpage methods which generally include link building. If you need to find someone who can do this type of method you can take a look at Nationsubmit SEO Services, where they have a few different type of services that can help with this.

Privacy Policies, Contact forms, Return Policy

And of course, while most people do not think its related having these types of information on your website can help cover your butt. These type of things are checked by WOT and siteadvisor and have even heard mention in a recent seminar the link between not having them and being ranked lower because of missing these pages. Not only that it will give your site more trust from your visitors.