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Four Simple SEO Tips for Good
Search Engine Rankings
Making simple changes to a website to improve search engine
rankings and drive traffic is not as complicated as it sounds.
This article details the factors that can be simply manipulated
yet produce big improvements if implemented correctly.
They are worth bookmarking or printing so they can be used in
the future as a checklist when creating new pages or reviewing
your website.
1. Key phrase
Research
Before you can begin implementing any of the optimization
techniques mentioned in the rest of this article, you will need
to know which key phrases you are going to optimize your site
for. Once this is decided, everything becomes a lot clearer.
You should be able to get a rough idea of target key phrases
from the content on the pages within your site. At the end of
the day, if there's not any content at which to target
optimization, achieving good search engine rankings will be very
difficult and ultimately pointless! Visitors will leave
immediately if they are not provided with the content they are
searching for.
A frequent mistake is to target the key phrases that drive the
largest search volumes. It's important to target key phrases
that directly relate to your websites content, and the more
defined the key phrases are the better.
Using key phrases that may drive 120 high convertible visitors
to your site each month is likely to be much better than
targeting a highly competitive broad key phrase that is only
vaguely related to your business, even if it does attract 30,000
searches each month.
2. Page
Titles
This is one of the key on-page elements that can be optimized.
Each title should be different, and full of key phrases related
to the content of its page. Search engines often only display
the first 65 or so characters of the page title, so it's
important to get the most important key phrases at the beginning
of the page title. Also, the characters near the front of the
page title are given more significance in algorithms.
The page title is displayed in the search engine results, so
must make sense and encourage browsers to action the link.
Finding a balance between readability and key phrases density is
a challenge but something that will improve with time and
practice.
3.
Meta Description
The meta description is not actually included in search engine
algorithms, although as it is displayed in search engine results
pages, it is vital it is optimized. Like page titles, the meta
description should be specific to every page and contain text
that is relevant to the key phrases that page is aimed at.
The meta description is limited to around 160 characters, so it
can often be challenging to fit all the required info into such
a small space. However, if no meta description is entered,
search engines tend to grab a random chunk of text from the
page, regardless if it makes sense or is useful to the searcher.
You can avoid this from happening, by ensuring every page has a
meta description of some variety.
4. Page
Content
Page content is viewed as the best method of attracting visitors
and incoming links to a website, so it's important that it is
given sufficient time and resource. Search engines thrive on
content, so the more content on your site the better for search
engine rankings.
Content is less important now in search engine algorithms than
it has been however, I suggest ensuring every key phrase that is
being targeted is mentioned about every 100 words or so.
Beware - don't fall into the trap of key phrase stuffing! Search
engines employ advanced techniques to track this and will more
than likely pick up on it immediately and you could end up with
a blacklisted site that is impossible to rank.
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