SAMIEI SOLUTIONS

Top 10 SEO Tips

The fol­low­ing tips are not nec­es­sar­ily in order of impor­tance, but are in the order you should con­sider when build­ing a new web­site from scratch. My top 10 tips ranked by order of impor­tance for high rank­ings are dis­played elsewhere.

1. Know your geo­graphic mar­ket and ensure your domain has the cor­rect TLD.
   If your pri­mary mar­ket is the UK it is impor­tant to use a .UK TLD and ide­ally have your domain hosted on UK based servers.
2. Include key­word in Domain name (using hyphens if nec­es­sary).
   This doesn’t mean hav­ing a domain name like keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com try to stick to the one hyphen and not read as spammy. A good exam­ple is a site that sells wheel­chair ramps with the URL of the site being www.wheelchair-ramps.co.uk
3. Cre­ate as much con­tent about your prod­ucts or sub­ject as you can.
   After doing this divide in to 4 or 5 sec­tions (this will help later when cre­at­ing your nav­i­ga­tion struc­ture)
4. AFTER you have your site con­tent start key­word research­ing
   There are tools you can use for key­word research; Word­tracker and The Google AdWords Key­word Tool to name but two. I per­son­ally use a com­bi­na­tion of the Google Key­word Tool, Google LSI and T.J. Com­mon Sense.
5. Decide on 4 or 5 pri­mary key­words to use as main sub-sections
   Ide­ally have an idea of 4 or 5 main key­words, call them your Pri­mary Key­words and then try to posi­tion sec­ondary key­words with the Pri­mary Word most closely asso­ci­ated with it.
6. Sit down and sketch out your nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem
   Put a lot of time in to this and play around until it is right, use Pri­mary Key­word as head­ers for 5 main Sub-sections and use sec­ondary key­words as head­ers for con­tent pages under each Pri­mary Keyword

   The above dia­gram shows the early stages of con­struct­ing a nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem. The green sec­tion (Sub-1) shows how all other sub sec­tions will be. The Home page, All 5 Sub-section, About us, Terms, Con­tact, Pri­vacy, Resources and Sitemap pages are always inter­linked with each other form­ing 12 strong pages (more about this later)

7. Re-write con­tent using knowl­edge pre­vi­ously gained about key­words and phrases
   This doesn’t mean totally re-writing and stuff­ing the page with key­words, it requires writ­ing para­graphs ensur­ing the right phrases are in the right places but isn’t obvi­ous that the phrases are writ­ten for the search engines. Do not write too much infor­ma­tion on each page and do not stray of in to writ­ing about some­thing else.
8. Struc­ture each indi­vid­ual page
   With your con­tent rich, key­word bal­anced page writ­ten, you now have to cre­ate the page struc­ture. Each page should be seen as an indi­vid­ual web­site.
   Start­ing from the top,
   • Page title should reflect the con­tent of the Page ensur­ing you use the pri­mary key­word for that Page
   • Meta key­word tags, (although not overly impor­tant), should list 4 or 5 indi­vid­ual key­words related to the Page you have created.
   • Meta Descrip­tion tags, this should be a short con­cise descrip­tion describ­ing what the Page is about. This is very impor­tant as a sell­ing point as you can manip­u­late the search engines in to dis­play­ing this when the per­son searches for the key­word used in the descrip­tion. A favourite of mine is “Pro­vides infor­ma­tion about the lat­est KEYWORD now in stock and avail­able online” or words suit­able for the product.
   • Avoid bloated code by using exter­nal style sheets and min­i­mum coding.
   • Main page lay­out was pre­vi­ously dis­cussed whilst sketch­ing the nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem, but it is impor­tant that all links are seen by the engines and are using the cor­rect anchor text related to the pages they are point­ing too. Avoid using javas­cipt for links and if you have to use images ensure you use the cor­rect alt attrib­utes. If the page has too many links on it and looks messy this can be over­come by using a com­bi­na­tion of css and javascript to cre­ate drop down boxes, but should only be used if you know what you are doing. If you have the oppo­site prob­lem, and want to include links on the page but not nec­es­sar­ily have search engines fol­low them, this can be achieved using drop down option boxes.
   • With yout gen­eral lay­out and your link­ing struc­ture sorted you should now sort out your head­ings. The main page head­ing of the page should use your Key­words and be in H1 Tags, this should be fol­lowed by your most impor­tant para­graph, ide­ally work­ing down the page you should use sec­ondary head­ers from h2 to h4 (always using the key­words if possible)
   • If you have used images on your page ensure key­words in the Alt attrib­utes, this doesn’t mean key­word stuff them but just describe the image using the keyword.
9. Proof read your com­pleted page and get a 2nd opin­ion
   With your page com­pleted try and get some­one to check it for you to see if it reads to spammy and to see if you have missed out any obvi­ous key phrases that should be on the page.
10. Con­struct your site.
    With the pre­vi­ous pro­ce­dure com­pleted for all pages it’s now time to put the site together. Sim­ply use the pre­vi­ously devised link­ing struc­ture, group sim­i­lar pages together under appro­pri­ate sub head­ings and ensure all links are active and using cor­rect anchor text.

Related posts:

1. Pick Your Tar­get Key­words and Posi­tion Your Key­words Meant for Search Engine Eyes
2. Ten Tips to the Top of the Search Engines
3. Joomla SEO, for a Search Engine Friendly Website
4. Con­tent Optimization
5. Top 10 Joomla SEO tips for Google