What Are Search Engine Optimization Basics?
When you think about SEO basics it’s important for your website ranking and it’s important for each individual page. Each page has its own rank in the search engines, the whole website is the sum of all parts.
Based on experience the three strongest elements to a page are its Domain Name, Title Tag and Back Links, and depending on the level of competition for your search phrase, an adjustment to any of these can increase your page anywhere from a couple all the way up to hundreds of spots.
There are some other elements as well, that I will also cover in this article.
Domain Name
Include keywords, if possible; however, don’t make it “spammy” with too much hyphenation!
My personal rule of thumb is no more than 2 hyphens, if any.
If your niche is wedding favors, and all the “good” domain names are taken, you could consider beautiful-wedding-favors.com, but I wouldn’t recommend the-very-best-wedding-favors-ever.com
Get the picture?
The Title Tag
I think of it like the mullet hairstyle: business up front & a party in the back. Your most important keywords should be in the front, and it should be followed with a compelling reason to click the link:
Beautiful Wedding Favors: We ship your Wedding Favors for Free
Beach Wedding Favors: Free Shipping on all Beach Theme Favors
You don’t have to “stuff” the title tag, and in the search results it is the most prominent, clickable element. You want to design it to help you rank higher AND get more clicks than the other folks.
Back Links
It has been said that enough back links can solve any ranking problem, and that may or may not be true, but you do want to make them work well for you. With all the search engine algorithms the question is does it help?
Remember, anchor text matters!
Your best links will include keyword rich words and phrases, not your URL.
For example:
Buy beautiful beach wedding favors from my-great-sites
…is MUCH better than…
Buy beautiful beach wedding favors from http://my-great-sites.com
Hint: Your links should look NATURAL. In other words, they shouldn’t all say exactly the same thing. Immediately having 10,000 back links to a site that’s been online 2 days, with all the same exact links just doesn’t “feel” right.
ALSO … Remember that you want to get links DEEP into your site, not just the home page, so be sure to get links to categories and even product level pages (if you’re in eCommerce)!
The next element that I work diligently on to make keyword rich is the actual page name. Yeah I know that’s a contradiction which will become clear in the future. Consider the keywords that you have targeted for that page, and name the pages accordingly – even in ecommerce and database driven sites.
Page Names
Do you have a generic domain, or a custom domain?
(www. mydomain. com/seo-expert-tips. html vs. www. mydomain. com/?3z42.php)
Your pages should be themed based on relevance. If the page is about beach wedding favors, keep the content relevant. Don’t stray and add extra content about wedding shoes and the dress – unless it’s appropriate.
Meta Description
Your sites Meta Description should NOT be ignored. While it will not affect the search results, it can alter the results of the search and drive a higher click-through rate.
This is the second feature anyone will notice about your site, BEFORE they ever arrive on the page. So use keyword rich content with compelling text to encourage them to click on that search engine listing to visit your site. I have seen occasions on our
own site where we were getting higher click-through rate at position #2 than the listing at position #1, and our only conclusion is that our meta description copy was more appealing to the user.
Meta Keywords
Meta Keywords are certainly not used for ranking, but I add them to each page so that I can keep track of what the page theme is ranking for. Some folks are concerned that using them this way would allow others to “steal” your keywords, but seriously there are so many other tools they don’t need to see my meta keywords to find out what keyword I’m trying to rank for.
These are just some of the basics of SEO that can help your page rank better.
There are additional factors that you may want to add depending on your site.
Learning more about Search Engine Optimization by spying on your competitors with Traffic Travis
