Search engine optimization

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Quick Tips To Top Search Engine Rankings

In this article I show you how to improve your search engine rankings using these quick search engine optimization tips.

What to do

Title Tag - The title tag should contain a title relevant to the page, not just "Home Page" or "Contact Us". The title should be used for up to five keywords.

Headings - Search engines view <h> tags as terms of emphasis, meaning additional weight is given to terms that appear inside them. Keywords should appear in <h> tags.

Bold - Also viewed as terms of emphasis, but with less weight than headings.

Alt Text - Brief descriptive sentences should be used in image alt attributes. At least one keyword should appear in each alt attribute.

Keyword Meta tag - Some engines use the keyword meta tags directly, some use them as part of a validation process ensuring that the keywords closely match the page content. The latter is the more typical scenario for modern engines. Keywords should be chosen carefully and be specific to the page they appear on.

Description Meta Tag - Most search engines use this tag in a similar fashion as the keyword tags. Each page should have a unique description. The description should contain a few keywords and briefly summarize the content that appears on the page with a high degree of accuracy.

Keyword Placement - Terms that are higher up on a page are more heavily weighted.

Keyword Proximity - Terms that are close together are probably related, and thus the site will show up in searches for those terms.

Comment Tags - Some search engines use comment tags for content, particularly in graphics rich/text poor sites.

Page Structure Validation - Proper coding is likely to be of better overall quality, and thus rewarded.

Traffic/Visitors - Search engines keep track of how many people follow their links. The more a link is followed for a given search, the more relevant the link is assumed to be.

Link Popularity - Also known as PageRank, this is a measure of how many web pages on the Internet link to your site and the relevance of those pages to the page they are linking to. The popularity of the linking site is also evaluated.

Anchor Text for Inbound Links - This is a measure of the relevance of the anchor text from the referring site.

Page Last Modified - Newer content is regarded as "fresh" and is treated as more relevant.

Page Size - Engines tend to weigh content at the start of a document more than content further down. If a page is too long, typically more than 50k in markup only, then it should be broken up into multiple pages.

Keywords in URL - URLs are considered important by engines. Use of hyphens rather than underscores in filenames and using keywords in filenames and directories improves a pages potential relevance.

What not to do

Broken Links - Internally or outgoing, search engines do not view pages with broken links as pages with fresh content, and are going to be scored as less relevant for their keywords.

Spam- This refers to any attempt to trick a search engine, such as using irrelevant keywords to draw extra hits, placing invisible content on the page to boost keyword density, and using meta refreshes (often in combination with irrelevant keywords) to draw a user in for an irrelevant search and then direct them to the page you want them to see. These techniques can result in a ban from search engines if they catch them.

Excessive Search Engine Submittal - Over submitting a site to a search engine will likely result in a ban. Submit no more than once every three months, according to Google.

Empty Alt Attributes - Empty alt tags is a major accessibility issue as well as just poor coding, and will affect a page negatively.

Excessive Punctuation - Excess punctuation in the Title and Description tags wastes valuable space and may cause a problem with the engine.

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