SEO – Guides to Improve your Site Rankings
The higher your site is displayed in search results, the more clicks and more visitors to your website you will get! To have your site come up higher in FREE search results, you may optimize it and improve its rankings.
I am sharing the information about SEO because last time my website traffic is not much but after I applied the SEO tutorials that I posted here in my blog, my traffic goes up.
How to optimize your website?
There is a number of factors that affect your free rankings in search results. These are:
- Keyword Selection
- Meta Tag Optimization
- Content Optimization
- Link Exchange
Keyword Selection
The first step to the search engine optimization is to choose the keywords you wish to target with your website. Your task is to determine on which search phrases, you wish to have your site listed in the Search engine results page. Once you determine a set of such phrases, you should include them in the content and the meta tags of your web page(s) to have a successful SEO process.
What are keywords?
The keywords are important words that your visitors use to find your site. The prospect visitor will type a keyword (or a combination of words) in the search engine and will get a list of results. In order your website to be displayed by the search engines on a specific search phrase the search engines should “believe” that your website is relevant for this search phrase. To make your website relevant for a certain keyword you need to choose them carefully and to use them wisely in your website content and meta tags.
How to choose successful keywords?
Although this is the most essential question, it is actually simple and very logical. The keywords are words that describe the topic(s) included and discussed on your website. For example, if your website advertises the surfing lessons that you give, you may use the following keywords and phrases:
One thing you should remember, when choosing successful keywords, is that the best keywords are the ones that people will use in their day to day language in describing your service, product or website topic.
We recommend that you choose some less general keywords in order to achieve better results. For example in the case of the surfing website, the word “sport” is far too general. If you choose if you will be competing with far too many websites on that word and many of the people, who use this word as a search phrase will actually not be looking for surfing lessons.
Meta tags: title, keywords, description
The meta tags are a very important part of the HTML code of your web page. They are read by the search engines but are not displayed as a part of your web page design. Usually they include a concise summary of the web page content and you should include your relevant keywords in them. Most meta tags are included within the ‘header’ code of a website. The most important tags are the title, description, keyword s and robot tags.
<head>
<title>Surfing, Surf, Surf Information, Guides, Lessons, Travel Info</title>
<meta name=description content=”Surfing: All you need to know about surfing”>
<meta name=keyword content=”surf, surfing, surfing waves, surf equipment”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow”>
</head>
….
The title tag and the meta description and keywords tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe. Besides that, you should consider the length and the order of the characters/words included in each of the meta tags. Note that the search engine robots read from left to right and those words that come first are more important than those that come towards the end of the page.
Title tag
It could be said that the title is one of the most important factors for a successful search engine optimization of your website. Located within the <head> section, right above the Description and Keywords tag, it provides summarized information about your website. Besides that, the title is what appears on search engines result page (SERP).
The title tags should be between 10-60 characters. This is not a law, but a relative guideline – a few more symbols is not a problem. You won’t get penalized for having longer title tags, but the search engine will simply ignore the longer part.
Meta Description tag
The description tag should be written in such way that it will show what information your website contains or what your website is about. Write short and clear sentences that will not confuse your visitors.
The description tag should be less than 200 characters. The meta description tag also has a great importance for the SEO optimization of your page. It is most important for the prospect visitor when looking at the search engine result page – this tag is often displayed there and helps you to distinguish your site from the others in the list.
Meta Keywords tag
Lately, the meta keyword tag has become the least important tag for the search engines and especially Google. However, it is an easy way to reinforce once again your most important keywords. We recommend its usage as we believe that it may help the SEO process, especially if you follow the rules mentioned below.
The keyword tags should contain between 4 and 10 keywords. They should be listed with commas and should correspond to the major search phrases you are targeting. Every word in this tag should appear somewhere in the body, or you might get penalized for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice, or it may be considered spam.
Meta Robots tag
This tag helps you to specify the way your website will be crawled by the search engine. There are 4 types of Meta Robots Tag:
Index, Follow – The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the main/index page and then will continue to the rest of the pages.
Index, NoFollow – The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the main/index page and then will NOT continue to the rest of the pages.
NoIndex, Follow – The search engine robots will skip the main/index page, but will crawl the rest of the pages.
NoIndex, NoFollow – None of your pages will be crawled by the robot and your website will not be indexes by the search engines.
If you want to be sure that all robots will crawl you website we advise you to add a “Index, follow” meta robot tag. Please note that most of the search engine crawlers will index your page staring from the index page, continuing to the rest of the pages, even if you do not have a robot tag. So if you wish your page not to be crawled or to be crawled differently use the appropriate robot tag.
How to edit meta tags?
You can edit your meta tags through the File Manager in the cPanel of your hosting account. You need to edit the file of each web page. The file contains the HTML code of the page.
Web Page Content Optimization
The content of your website is important for the search engines as they consider your website’s relevancy and importance based on both meta tags and content in relation to the important keywords. There are several guidelines you should follow:
Include keywords in text
You should make sure that all those keywords you have included in your meta tags and on which searches you wish to come up are included in the text of your site.
Consider 5-20% density of the keywords in text
You should make sure that about 5% to 20% of your text is keywords. Be careful not to overcrowd your text with keywords cause you might get penalized. Note that you should have the most important keyword(s) in the beginning of the page as thus they are given more weight.
Mind the formatting of the text
Formatting (bolding, titles, etc.) is also important to show the search engines that certain words are more important than others. Thus, if you bold your keywords in your text, they are perceived as more important than other words and thus your text becomes more relevant to these keywords.
Add regularly relevant content to site
You should make sure that you add relevant content to your website. This content addition invites Google to visit your site more often and increase its relevance and importance.
Link Exchange
Link exchange is the most successful way for increasing your visitor traffic without paying any money for advertising. Link exchange is also considered essential for the searchability of your website – search engines like sites with a great number of incoming links as these sites are perceived as more important than poorly linked sites.
In the ideal world, it would be great if you could only have incoming links to your site and no outgoing, however, in reality you can rarely have your link listed on a relevant site unless you link in return. That is why link exchange is so important. There are a few guidelines you should consider when swapping links:
Get as many incoming links as possible
The greater the number of incoming links to your site, the more popular it becomes for search engines.
Exchange links with pages with higher Google rank
The higher the Google rank of the pages linking to yours, the bigger the boost to your site rankings is. The more relevant the content of the partner sites to your own, the higher your URL shows in search results and the more people visit your page.
Interlink site’s pages
A specific page’s importance is also measured by the the importance and depth of the other pages on on the site that refer to the page in question. This means that you should interlink internal pages as well to increase their importance.
Having your link on Yahoo directory also counts. But when you swap with people who have the same interest as you, it’s easier and free. You place their link, they place yours. There is the question of reciprocity – some people think that reciprocal link are not quality links. However, there is no proof of that statement.
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Hello guys! My name is R3ALISTIC WEB - a.k.a "R3" . I am fulltime / freelance web designer and blogger wanna be from the Philippines. R3ALISTIC is a blog site all about tutorials, design, ideas, and daily web trends. 
Nice article, I think its important to do enough research in the beginning, so that you optimize the site for the most traffic, no sense in optimizing for a term that does not convert to customers.
I’m still searching more about SEO. Thanks.
Links Exchange? Isn’t that a 5-8 years ago strategy?!?! As far as I know excessive links exchange could even get your site penalized…. I’d recommend trying building one way links in the 100s of different options available before getting into links exchange.