Hello everyone,

SEO is a topic that is often difficult and potentially costly to apply if you are unfamiliar with the processes and methods. SEO is a combination of techniques to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your web site from major search engines such as Google or Yahoo. In this article, I will list some quick and easy techniques that can help you accomplish higher page rankings and increase traffic to your web site.

Page Title

• Check the length of your page title. If it’s under 50 characters then you should add an additional word. The maximum recommended length for page titles is 70 characters. Something thats related to your site such as ‘Shirts’, ‘Flowers’, ‘Web Design’, ‘Coupons’, ‘Envelopes’, or even a name of a local town or county would be a great addition.
• Make sure your key phrase is at the beginning of your title. Rather than ‘Noam Design - Increase your site’s traffic and Page Rank with theses simple steps’ go for ‘Increase your site’s traffic and Page Rank with theses simple steps by Noam Design. Google prefers key phrases as close to the beginning of your title as possible.

Meta Data

• Keywords – Make the keywords specific to every page they are on. Ensure that your most important phrases are at the beginning.
• Description – Make sure the main keyword you want your page found for is as close to the beginning of the description as possible. Ideally it should start in the first 3 words.

Headings and Subheadings

• Ensure you have only one h1 (heading 1) tag on each page. Subsequent headings can be wrapped around other heading tags such as (H2, H3, H4, H5, H6).
• Check that every heading relates to your content directly below it. So if a heading contains a keyword, make sure this keyword is in the first sentence below the heading.

Internal Linking

• When linking to other pages within your website, don’t just call them ‘products’, ‘services’, ‘gallery’ etc. Try adding an additional word to these to describe the page the link goes to. Something like ‘Marketing Products’, ‘SEO Services’, ‘Web Design Gallery’. These describe the page that the link goes to in better detail.

• When linking to your home page, don’t link to ‘index.php’, ‘index.htm’ etc. Link to your full domain name without this on the end. So rather than me linking to www.yourdomainname.com/index.php I would just link to www.yourdomainname.com. Two addresses for the same page is very bad in the eyes of Google.

• Add the ‘nofollow’ rule to pages that are not intended to get rankings. Pages like ‘Privacy’ and ‘Terms’ etc.

External Linking

• Links to high rankings sites that are relevant to the content of your page. This may be a link to a news website that talks about the same topic or even Wikipedia.

Inbound Links

• Submit your website to directories or CSS Galleries.

I hope this was of some use to you. If you are interested in learning more about SEO strategy, check out this in-depth article. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below.