7 Simple Steps to Improve SEO
Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) today in seven simple steps.
Image by Hobo! via Flickr
- Find keywords. Pick a list of words relevant to your business. Think about which words are most likely to get people to do what you want them to do (convert into leads) and focus on those words.
- Put keywords in Page Title. The Page Title is one of the most important things that Google and other search engines evaluate to determine what is on a web page. Put your keyword or phrase in the title, keep it short.
- Put keywords in Page URL. Google and other search engines also use the text of the URL of the page to determine the content of the web page. You should use your keyword or phrase in the URL of the web page.
- Put keywords in Meta Data. While the page Meta Data (Page Description and Keywords) are not nearly as important as they used to be, they still count. Take advantage of them by putting your keyword or phrase there.
- Put keywords in your H1 text. The H1 to H6 tags are used to define HTML headings. H1 defines the largest heading and H6 defines the smallest heading. There should only be one H1 tag on your site – the name of your business or the name of the page or the name of the article. The following tags are secondary; much like the outline for a class term paper.
- Use keywords in the page content. Putting keyword phrases in your page content also signals to search engines that the page is actually about the keyword and should show up in search results.
- Monitor your rank. Give the search engines some time to do their thing (couple days) and then keep checking your rank to see what happened and track your progress.
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How Do People Find YOUR Content?
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts, WordPress - Blog Tips, Plugins & How-To
How do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO). Here are 5 of the best SEO plugins.
SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings
Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.
SEO Friendly Images
Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.
SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin
If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.
SEO Post Link
The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.
SEO Smart Links
Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.
Do you have SEO favorites? Share them in the comments.
“404 Not Found” Page Kills Spiders
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts
Free Links to Your Site
I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free. The Google webmaster blog just announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site. Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google and SEO
When someone comes to your site from a broken link, like KDandCompany.com/seiwi, the server generally returns the dreadful error code – 404 Page Not Found. Unless you have created a custom page, you might be driving visitors away.
Let’s talk about spiders for a second. You know, the same technology that the search engines use to index your pages. When’s the last time you ran one on your own site? Did you know that your custom “404 not found” error page could be driving them away?
You’ll want to sic a spider on your own site, before letting MSN, Google or Yahoo get at it. Why? To make sure its spiderable, that’s why! Huh??? Didn’t think about validating your linking structure, did you?
There are many page whackers available that download a whole site to your hard drive, but who knows what kind of “forgiving” spidering technology they’re using. The best one, the one that replicates the crawling spiders like Google and Yahoo the closest, is a tool like OptiSpider.
Here’s a tip, if OptiSpider can’t spider your site… neither can Google. That’s right, it’s probably just about the best reason to get and use a tool like OptiSpider, just so you can see the same stuff the spiders see.
If you manage multiple sites for clients, it’s a great weapon in your toolbox! I can’t count how many times I’ve done coaching sessions for clients who claim search engines are not finding all their pages. A few seconds later – using OptiSpider – I can tell them… dude!!! You didn’t link to the pages properly, or your custom 404 not found page is killing the search engine spiders.
No Google, Yahoo or MSN spider is going to find all your pages, when you put the crawler in an endless feedback loop. You’re lucky if the spiders ever come back.
Stop doing whatever it is (even if it’s reading this article 
and go look at your custom 404 page. Everyone loves to use them. Unfortunately, many people use them badly. The biggest sin of all – even I was guilty of this – is using a relative link on the 404 page. It’s so common that relative linking should be banned altogether.
Imagine the spider is several directories down in your site and encounters a missing page or broken link, up comes your custom 404 error page. Too bad sucker! You used a relative link instead of an absolute one. The spider is totally miffed at your site and resets, leaving all the rest of your pages behind… unspidered, unindexed and unfound.
Stop whatever it is you’re doing and go do it now. Put an absolute link on your 404 page, one that includes the http://www. and your full .com web address to your home page. That way, when your custom 404 error page comes up, the spider won’t choke. Instead, it finds your home page from the custom 404 page and continues spidering like normal.
If you want to make spiders happy and be sure they can crawl your entire site, then use a spidering tool like OptiSpider to test your internal linking structure. Just don’t be surprised if you end up getting a whole lot more pages indexed by the search engines. What’s on your 404 page?
by Michael Campbell
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