SEO tips for your website
I see SEO efforts falling into two categories:
- Changes you make to your website to maximise thier position potential.
- Influences to create external links to your website.
Here are my top tips for effort No1. Not in any particular order.
Research the best keywords to use in your website to attract the users you are looking for. Then, include them in your meta tags and apply the 'strong' tag to the words as they appear in your content. You can use this page to help https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
Create a sitemap.xml for your website using https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
Register your website with the various search engines using:
- http://www.google.co.uk/submityourcontent/website-owner/
- http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
- http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Make sure that when a visitor clicks your website’s logo, they are taken back to the homepage.
Create a CSS stylesheet to make the website printer friendly.
Give each page a different <title> tag in order of page name, website name.
Optimise images using Gimp with techniques show here http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/optimize-images-web-gimp/
Adding ALT tags to all of the images. If the graphic is just for decorative purposes, just use ALT=""
Create a robots.txt file and place it in the root directory of your website.
Create a humans.txt file and place it in the root directory of your website.
Use the same colour for links throughout the website.
Add at least one picture to every page of the website.
Validate the source code with W3C validation tools and correct any errors using http://validator.w3.org/
Add Google analytics code to every page of the website. See http://www.google.com/analytics/.Create a favicon for the website. If possible also include other icons for tablets and smartphones etc. See http://iconifier.net/.
Only use email address that include @thesamedomain.
Label each box of any forms on the website.
Add Google site verification tag. See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35659?hl=en
Show a confirmation any time a visitor completes a significant action on the website.
Enlist the website with web directories such as http://dir.yahoo.com/ and http://www.dmoz.org/
Add microdata to your tags, see http://schema.org/
Include feeds from your blogs, facebook or twitter to make pages dynamic.
Create a Google+ page, see https://plus.google.com/pages/create.
Create a canonical link element, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element.
Create a custom 404 error page, see http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/custom404.shtml.
Add Dublin Core meta elements, see http://www.metatags.info/dublin_core_metadata_element_set.
Good luck
