Top 10 Tips for SEO Optimization

Posted on November 6, 2011 by

What Is SEO Optimization

Do you put a lot of effort into you website but don’t get the traffic your looking for? The problem could be the lack SEO of optimization on your website which can hinder the search engines from indexing.

When you hear the word index the first thought your mind runs to is a website or directory listing. Search engines don’t just index websites though, they also index images, videos, local listings, news stories, guest blog posts, etc. According to Google their combined search results are known as “Universal Searches” which are a culmination of listings that contain an enormous variety of content that is gathered by the Google’s crawling bots; these are tools that constantly scour the web for new and unique content.

Overall, optimizing the content and making a search engine friendly website will generate higher ranks, and in the end more traffic. Below are the top 10 most effective ways to optimize for SEO.

1. Sitemap: You can either create and submit these manually or you can take the easy route and download a plugin.

2. Meta Tags: The keywords that describe your site, these tags have a direct impact on your SERP rank position. These are typically short, concise descriptions that give as much information as possible. The primary focus of these is the for the search engines use them to index your page, users typically don’t view these.

3. Meta Description: Just as it sounds really, this is the overall description of your site or post, and its purpose. Keywords are still used here but they aren’t quite as important as Meta Tags. This description is more relevant to your niche so any content pertaining to your niche that is mentioned goes a long way.

4. Quality Content: This is the most important part of a post, without quality, unique, interesting content you don’t really have much. The longer the post the better by Google’s standards but most users don’t want to see a 3 page post, so about 300-750 words will do. That’s an SEO friendly amount so within those limits is the golden ticket.

5. Permalink Structure: It’s the structure of your permanent link after you have either published a post, category, page, picture, etc. You can adjust these settings to a more SEO friendly format by going to your Word Press dashboard and selecting Settings, Permalinks, Common Settings and Custom Structure.

6. Inner Linking: These are anchor text links within a site that link to another page within the same site. For example, if you have a published post and the link is featured in your blog roll, which is shown on more than 2 pages, other than the original post, that is Inner Linking.

7. Comment System: An effective comment system is key. There are two ways to go about doing this, you can choose either Dofollow or Nofollow which will affect your traffic. Dofollow are more desirable but draw in spam where as Nofollow offer nothing a link with out the power, so in tern there is less spam. As long as you have a decent comment system or comment protection I recommend Dofollow to encourage user comments.

8. Effective Backlinks: These are links left on other sites in the form of blog comments, forum threads/posts, guest blogging, social bookmarking, etc. The key is looking for three main elements: Pagerank, number of OBL (Out Bound Links), Dofollow attribute. The higher the page rank the better because your link holds more weight, and Dofollow is needed so your link can hold any weight at all. The lower the number of OBL the better, because every OBL takes a little rank and authority with it, thus leaving you less.

9. All In One SEO Pack: the most important plugin for SEO optimization, this plugin organizes and makes tags easy. This effective little plugin makes it so every post, page and article has a description of its own, just for search engines. To put it simply, it give your posts Meta Tags and Descriptions.

10. Load Speed: The speed in which a site loads is crucial for ranking and traffic. Having a slow loading site will not only reduce traffic and ranking but search engines have a hard time indexing due to latency limits on crawlers. If your side uses a lot of widgets and plugins for visual features you might consider downloading a cache system plugin. “WP Super Cache” is a perfect tool for this; turn it off when you make changes other than posts, and turn it on when your site is ready again.
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Nick Wilson is the owner, primary moderator, and main writer for SEO Journalist, which provides daily articles on website SEO and SMO performance. He is an experienced and versatile, professional SEO Consultant and Internet Marketer.
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Comments:

  • http://prowest.ws PROWEST

    This is a great list. My SEO needed some work so this helped a lot.
    Thanks.

  • http://www.yoursinfo.com/ Ajmja

    Thanks for the great share! I had no idea that site speed play such an important role in your websites overall user experience and site rank.
    Thank again for the info, great article.

    • http://www.seojournalist.com/ SEO Journalist

      When I starting working on my site speed originally it was terrible, over 2 seconds at times. I improved it a lot just through a plugin or two, but the effect it had made a huge difference on all of my SERP’s. Surprised me really, I didn’t expect it to play a global role throughout the site, although it did make sense after further research.