Summary: If you’ve got a website and you’re short on time, here’s our top 7 tips for giving your site an SEO boost in Google.
1. Create a blog
A blog is a great way to easily add fresh content to your website which Google loves. Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/) is a good platform for creating your own blog – it’s easy to install and use, it has great SEO plug ins like ‘All in One SEO’ (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/), and even Rand Fishkin rates it! Use blog grader (http://blog.grader.com/) to track how well your blog is doing. Update your blog regularly with fresh interesting content that is relevant to your site – we’d recommend 2-3 times a week if you want to see a decent impact in your rankings and traffic.
Make sure you use a plug in like ‘ShareThis’ (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/) which allows your users to quickly share your content with others via social networking, email, text etc.
2. Customise your meta data
It’s worth investing a bit of time in ensuring that you have unique titles and descriptions on all of your pages, and that these aren’t too long. Aim to put the key words/phrases you’re targetting in those titles/descriptions, placing them as early in the meta tag as possible (as long as they are relevant to that particular page). A good length for your title is 60 characters including spaces – your description should be no longer than 160 characters (and we recommend more like 120).
3. Make good use of your headings
Most SEO experts agree that headings are useful for SEO and will have at least some bearing on your rankings! That’s because they help Google determine what your page is about. So use H1, H2, H3 etc appropriately, giving meaningful headings that include key words and phrases so far as those are relevant.
It’s likely that Google pays more attention to a H1 tag than, say, a H5 tag. That’s why SEO experts generally agree that you should use H1 only once on the page, H2 only once and then H3, H4, H5 etc as many times as you like (well, as long as it makes sense to!), in that order.
4. Optimise your images
There are a few basic jobs you can do on your images to improve SEO:
- Ensure they are all named properly e.g. ‘red-astra-1999.jpg’ rather than ‘car.jpg’ or worse, ‘DSC001.jpg’! This tells Google what the image is about and helps Google further understand what your site is about.
- Always use ‘alt’ tags and give meaningful descriptions – again this tells Google something about the image and your page.
- Ensure images are optimised for size. Google does pay attention to speed so a slow loading site may suffer from less good rankings.
- Avoid having too many images for the same reason.
5. Grab some free inbound links
In a perfect world you’ll be planning and executing a varied link building strategy to help build Google’s trust in your site for key words and phrases. You’ll spend hours contacting relevant sites asking nicely for links and if you’re lucky, some will reply and oblige! But it’s not a perfect world and you don’t have time. What should you do?
The number one rule is, don’t resort to fast tactics – buying links, submitting to thousands of directories and the like. Google values quality over quantity – it’s relevance, trust and authority that count, not volume.
You can kick start your link portfolio using some legitimate sites without too much effort (some of these may be ‘no follow’ i.e. they don’t pass any link juice but it’s thought that no follow links are still valuable in relation to other search engines, i.e. not Google):
- Create a linked in profile (http://www.linkedin.com/) for your website/business. Link to it from your website.
- Create a facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/) for your website/business. Link to it from your website.
- Bookmark some of your better content using social bookmarking tools – our favourites right now are Stumbleupon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/), Digg (http://digg.com/) and Mr Wong! (http://www.mister-wong.com/). Make sure you use these tools properly, i.e. don’t just bookmark a load of pages from your own site or you’ll find your account is cancelled fairly quickly – bookmark other content on the web too (like .. our site!).
- Create a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/) – every time you update your site, twitter about it! (You can use a tool like TweetMeme – http://tweetmeme.com/ – to see how many people are ‘retweeting’ your content)
- Better still, install a blog using the Wordpress platform on your site so you can easily add new content (see above) and then use one of the Wordpress plugins to put all your posts straight onto Twitter (e.g. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/)
- Find forums on the web that are relevant to your website. Create accounts and add comments of value on threads in the forum. They will usually allow you to make a link back to your website although don’t spam them as they’ll just block your account.
- Write some short articles on your website topic (aim for original, interesting and useful content) and post them to article directories (see our article directories list to find out more).
Aim to obtain some links from relevant authority sites too – it’s a long process but you could set yourself a target of say contacting 5-10 per week with the aim to acquire 1-2 per week. Read our top tips for requesting links – and we’ve even given you a sample email you can use! To get ideas about where to obtain them from, use Yahoo’s site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) to check out your competitors’ websites. This will help you identify sites linking to them – who might potentially give you a link too.
6. Take advantage of Google’s free advertising
Not strictly SEO but if you’re a business, we’d recommend taking full advantage of Google’s free advertising – number one, put yourself on Google maps – your business will potentially appear at the top of the search engine for all local result, giving you great traffic, for nothing!
If you have products to sell, you can also use Google Base, another free Google service to get your products out there.
7. Create an RSS Feed
An RSS feed of your content will be spidered by the search engines and feed directories, giving you a potential SEO boost. You’ll also find other people want to put your feed on their website which is good news for you. Here are some tips for making your RSS feed perform better:
- Use good titles that include the key word or phrases you’re targetting (ensure these are relevant to the post though)
- Use full path links rather than relative links in the feed (as others may put the feed on their site)
- Ensure any links use targetted keywords (if others use the feed, it’ll give you links with good anchor text)
- Create a My.Yahoo home page and customise the home page to include your feed, by adding content and giving the URL to the feed. Many SEO experts swear this is a great way to get the feed spidered within 24-48 hours!
- Submit your feed to one of the many places that allow you to do this for free! (http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm)
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said at 3:14 am on August 20th, 2010
Thanks for the good info! I’m sure a lot of people will also find your post very helpful. I learn’t something to boost my site blog for more traffic. Thanks and keep on posting!