Ten SEO Tips

One of the most important things to consider when studying and implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies is the fact that there is a great deal of out-of-date information being circulated. Some of that bad information, if acted upon, can result in your pages being banned. That is why it is always best to supplement your SEO efforts with other traffic generation methods like viral marketing.

The SEO tips below should assist you in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them command most of the traffic. They are google and yahoo!. Another search engine that is growing in popularity is msn but do not focus too much on tactics for that engine until you have exhausted efforts in the two largest ones first. It’s recommended that you focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

Basic SEO

1. Insert relevant keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site. We cannot emphasize the word “relevant” enough here. It is also important that the title tag contains text which your target market can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

In regards to capturing consumers that are interested in using layaway to pay for goods or services, the words “layaway” “lay-away” and “lay away” (These are the most popular spellings for layaway) would become relevant keywords that you would add to your SEO campaign. We do not recommend that you use the word “eLayaway” as a keyword as it will bring people to our site (eLayaway.com) and not yours. At the end of the day, we want our merchants capturing the purchases associated with layaway and using eLayaway to process the payments.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page. Adding the exact same text in your h1 tag will tell the reader that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline. This adds to the relevancy of your site to the search and scores high with the search engines.

Another good strategy is to use your relevant keywords in the sub-headings and body copy of your website. The most important keywords can be bolded.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant (there’s that word again) to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers. IMPORTANT: Only do this if the image is relevant to the content on the page.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned. Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

More SEO Tips

Get the facts here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This page will explain most of what you should focus on along with what you should forget about.

If you have been thinking about handing over the task of SEO to someone outside of yourself, you should read some warnings before you part with any money. http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

When optimizing your site, be sure to consider Sitemap Protocols to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. This protocol not only makes it possible for a search engine to find important pages not easily accessed on your site (like ones behind forms) it also makes it so search engines can more intelligently crawl your site. See https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html for more information about Sitemaps.

SEO Discussion

The following link will take you to a jealously guarded FREE SEO discussion: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general. Search the forum for specific questions you may have.