Monday, April 4, 2011

Top 5 SEO Tricks

There are many hints, tips and tricks out there, so the team here at Your Plan B Company narrowed the long list down to our Top 5 SEO tricks:

1. Content content content - add fresh content!
Even if your site is a lead generation site or an e-commerce site that doesn’t seem like there’s a need for regularly added content, you should always be adding as much fresh content as possible. In order to rank well for a given set of keywords, you must write about the topics relating to these keywords. The more often content is added, the more likely search spiders will increase the frequency at which they crawl your site. Being crawled more often can help a page rank higher for its targeted set of keywords.

2. Good Code - alt attributes on ALL images
Putting alt attributes on your images actually serves two purposes. In terms of SEO, putting a brief yet descriptive alt attribute along with your image, places additional relevant text to your source code that the search engines can see when indexing your site. The more relevant text on your page the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings.

In addition, including image alt attributes help the visually impaired who access web sites using a screen reader. They can’t see the image, but with a descriptive alt attribute, they will be able to know what your image is and hopefully why it is there on the page.

3. Keywords really do help - check the keyword density
It is also important for you to use the important keywords in your content. Then you should also calculate the keyword density of each of the articles and it should be approximately close to 3%. Keywords help search engines to get an idea about what your website is about. You should make sure that the keyword density doesn’t exceed 8%. Otherwise your webpage may be regarded as spam by the search engines.

4. Site Maps are your friends - add a sitemap to your website
This makes it easier for the various search engine spiders to read and then index your web pages. As indexed web pages appear in the search engines, more people visit your website. And the higher you will float up in the searches.

5. Get more social - add your social media links!
Although technically not SEO, Social Media is such a growing factor in getting your web site noticed, that it’s an important element to include in your plan. Social media ranges from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more. There is a lot of relationship building involved, but as you build your own networks and build quality content on your web site or blog, you’ll see traffic to your website increasing, as well.

And remember, SEO is a contiued task on your website maintenance checklist. Don't stop learning about searches and techniques because there is always something new on the technology horizon!