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8 Important SEO Techniques To Kickstart Your Website
When you are starting a website or blog, it is important to have your search engine optimizing techniques ready. Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) is important, because if SEO is implanted correctly, the search engines supply a large number of visitors for your site.
But where do you start? What are the most important factors? Today, you will learn how to kickstart your new website or blog using a few very important Search Engine Optimizing techniques.
Today, we will start with the optimizing you can do on your webpages yourself. Please subscribe to the RSS feed to get the next part on link-building.
1. Structure
Search engines follow links. Links to other sites, but also when you link to your own pages or articles, the search engines follow them. That’s how they notice and index new pages on your site.
This is one reason to organize your articles, categories and pages in a structural way. A search engine (and even more important, your visitor) needs to know how to navigate through your website. It needs to know where to find the information they want to find. If they can’t, the search engine won’t index your page correctly.
That’s why you should make the structure and the navigation on your website as logic and organized as possible.
2. Title
The title of your site is very important for multiple reasons. A good title gives a visitor a clue where he’s located, but the most important value of your title tag is the search engine purpose.
The search engines put a lot of value in these titles. The first words in your title are the most important for ranking higher, but it is also important to grab the attention of the visitor when he is scanning the search engine results. It’s therefore important to put your most important keywords as far upfront as possible, followed by your company/blog name.
My titles usually look like this:
Article title – DivitoDesign
Category “Search Engine Optimizing” – DivitoDesign
Archives “2009″ – DivitoDesign
You can read more on effectively building your title tag structures on SEOmoz’ “Best practices for Title Tags“.
3. Headings
To make your article or website readable and scan-able for your visitors, you should use headings to separate different parts of your content. Headings have the same purpose for the search engines: they need to know what’s on the page too. When using heading tags effectively, you build structure in your article and you put more value on the most important keywords.
There are a number of important heading tags in HTML ranging from very important (<h1>) to not very important (<h6>):
- <h1>
- <h2>
- <h3>
- <h4>
- <h5>
- <h6>
Don’t underestimate the effect of even the <h5> and <h6> tags when you use them correctly (see point 7 for more.)
On my homepage (with multiple rotating article titles) I use the <h1> for my logo. On a single page however, I change the <h1> to a <h2> for the logo, and the article title (which is most important here) gets the <h1> tag.
You can read more on using heading tags on the HTML heading tags guide.
4. Images
Images are a great way to create a better looking article or website. Fortunately, we can also use images to help us in our search engine optimizing strategy.
A <img /> tag has a number of options to describe the image:
- Alt=”"
- title=”"
You have to remember that a search engine is not a visitor, they can’t read the pixels. That’s why we have to describe the image to make sure the search engine knows what the image means. And if we do that correctly, the search engine will display your images in image search queries too.
Here’s how the tag from a picture of a brown bear should look:
1
<img title="Brown Bear Example" src="/images/brown-bear.jpg" alt="Brown Bear Example" />
5. URL’s
When people scan the search engine results pages, they always notice three things. The title, the description and the URL. The position of your result combined with those three factors make the user decide to click the link. It’s important to let the visitor understand where he is going to.
Which URL would you visit when you were searching for a Nokia n73?
/reviews/nokia/n73
/?id=34o323&p=2123&product=9238923
I think that’s a clear choice. Depending on which Content Management System (CMS) you use, you will have to options to optimize the URL’s of your content. Here is a tutorial for WordPress and Joomla.
6. Anchor Text
A very important part of linking to other sites and to your own articles is the use of anchor text. If you build a link, they text the visitor has to click is the anchor text.
You can optimize your anchor text so that your visitor and the search engine know where the link is leading to. You have to do that with the use of keywords. Here are two examples:
- To visit the article, click here.
- Click here to visit the article on Search Engine Optimizing
The first link doesn’t have anything specific that describe the page you are heading when you click the link. The second one explains your visitor and the search engine what happens: you will visit a page on Search Engine Optimizing.
You get the point, try using as many keywords when linking as possible. Click to read more about Keywords & Anchor text.
7. Mark Important Keywords
If you have written an article or your site’s content, you are not done. You have to optimize your text for your visitors and for the search engines. Visitors scan your text and read the piece of content that grabs their attention. How can you grab the attention? By using italic text, strong and bold text, underlined text, images, blockquotes and more.
The search engines use some of these attention-grabbers to get the most accurate results for all the keywords. That’s why it is important to highlight the most important keywords. You can use a number of attention-grabbers that serve search engine optimizing purpose too:
- italic text
- bold & strong text
You can also delete all the style declarations from the <h5> or <h6> tag, so that you can use these tags in your content. After you’ve did that, you can use these <h5> or <h6> tags to highlight the keywords in your content, and the visitor doesn’t even notice!
1
h6{ padding:0; margin:0; line-height:0; font-weight:normal; }
8. Meta Tags
Meta tags are not very important for search engines to rank your website. It is however very important to get good results from the search engine results pages once you are listed. These visitors needs to be pulled in via three things: your page’s title (point 2), the URL (point 5) and your page’s description (this point!).
That’s why I suggest adding the following keywords to all your webpages on your site.
1 2 3
<meta name="description" content="The brief description of your site. This will be displayed in the search engine results pages. 150 CHARACTERS " />
<meta name="keywords" content="maximal, ten, important, keywords, here" />
Next Part: On Linkbuilding
Not only the search engine optimizing techniques on your own site are important, there is a lot more. We will be discussing many: link-building, keyword-research and a lot more. Please subscribe to our RSS feed to keep updated.
Mark important keywords, that’s the part I always forget to do. Looking forward to the Linkbuidling post.
Interesting article.
I would agree with everything except underlining text to emphasise it, it looks too much like a link and will probably confuse people.
Thanks for your input, Mike.
I can understand your point. For my blog, it wouldn’t an option, because my links look exactly like the underlined text. However, if you have very different styles for links/underlined text, why not?
Because it’s a bad practise. Underlining text implicits a link, whatever you try to achieve. Don’t fool users on that.
Just never ever do it.
Be wary of accessibility issues; point 7 is a complete nightmare with a screen reader and will fail any accessibility testing.
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Great post. The site structure part is particularly important. Not only does it cover SEO (needs to be indexable) but also human-optimization; websites need to be navigatable!
Really looking forward to your Link Building post – just subscribed to your feed!
If you like this then check out my case study: Search Engine Optimzation Success Stories. It illustrates how the best in the business do there jobs
Keep it up!
I have to agree with Developer, as of yet, accessibility isn’t considered necessary for search engines; however, if it makes it easier for ‘software’ to read the website, it can’t be a bad thing in regards to search engine spiders.
Other than that though, I like your article, will definitely be keeping tabs on it for the link building article.
[...] 8 Important SEO Techniques To Kickstart Your Website If SEO is implanted correctly, the search engines supply a large number of visitors for your site. (tags: searching css) [...]
Great post. Very informative.
It’s important to note the character limite on the meta title and description. If the user can read the rest, it doesn’t make sense or help you anymore. I like to think of it as a short story that helps users figure out whether or not to click on your site. Hopefully, it attracts the right people and weeds out the wrong ones so you’re bounce rate goes down and your site visits lengthen.
Looking forward to reading the LinkBuilding article. Lots of debate out there about reciprocal links vs. backlinks and their value.
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Great post, thanks a lot !
Awesome post! Right now I’m trying to do my best to get my site listed http://www.yourfortmyersbeachvacation.com Does Google punish you for putting up your site too early? Seems like mine is that way.
Good blog. Link Building is a fundamental skill for SEO practitioners, but many go about it in ways that could hurt their long term ranking benefit.
Few More Important Tips…….
Find the Best Keywords
Code Validity
Optimize Your META Tags
Create a Site Map Page
sitemap.xml for Google
—–
Alex
Web Hosting Reviews
So many web designers ignore SEO and you really can’t. SEO is an integral part of design.
this is an important info !!!!
[...] divitodesign Post tags: Posted in: Uncategorized | | [...]
[...] engine optimizing campaign. In the first part of my search engine optimizing tutorial, I gave you 8 SEO tips that you can implant on your website or blog. Today, we will talk about how to get quality links pointing to your [...]
Very informative post. I’ve just started my own website and the information here is crucial to me developing a well ranked site. I’m sure your tips will help me develop my site.
Thanks
Provided the very good and great tips.Thanks for sharing the very nice information.Really nice.
very good article , i learned many things from this post .. i am so happy
but i have to ask you some thing , i really copy and past the code for h5 & h6 headers to my css file , but when i chose this header from posting panel in wordpress it perform the head to all paragraph how can i perform this to only on one or two words in the paragraph from the posting panel without do the same to all words
thanks in advance
ismail mohamed
Alexandria – Egypt
Hello Thank you very much for your SEO Tips!
Semmy
I have read that alt tags are better than title tags for images. But I guess no one really knows except for Googlers lol
Thanks this tuto group the most important thing to do also s engine needs a good content
Great points….I think you touched on the most important ones.
I see alot of people with terrible URL structure!
You should seriously think about building up this blog into a major authority in this market. You obviously have a good handle of the topics everyone is looking for on this site anyways and you could potentially even earn a buck or two off of some ads. I would look into following recent topics and increasing the amount of write ups you make and I bet you’d begin receiving some easy traffic in the near future. Just a brainstorm, good luck regardless!
Very good post. Simle changes, which will yield great results. Thanks for the valuable info
check out this site. http://www.seo-quotes.com.au/b
[...] 8 Important SEO Techniques To Kickstart Your Website « DivitoDesign [...]
Thanks for sharing, blog tag style is helpful too. And usually I only use underline for link.
in my opinion..i think you should deal with the meta tags..and by registering your link to different sites that is related..by putting this tags…
Nice article to share these are the basics of SEO , mete tag is not much important for search engines but there is not any negative work to include them, most important part Of SEO is Link building the whole SEO now around the link Structure,the link your site getting how relevance to your site.
True, Meta Tags are nowadays not very important for results, but for the way your result looks on the SE results pages.
Nice stuff.This is my first time i visit here. I found so many interesting in your blog especially its discussion.Keep your blog updating,good luck…
Thanks Providing Such a Great Techniques ..
I have more impressed this article..
thanks,
Hussey
Your blog was very detailed, but I have to comment that you should note that their are risks in every category that would also increase your ranking.
Emphasizing keywords are a great way to get search engines to pick up on them and increase your ranking however emphasizing to many words or emphasizing words that are in high competition in Google searches will not aid a website in SEO and may even hinder it.
I would recommend people to hire a SEO firm to handle your website instead of trying to do it yourself. I have used the Dalai Group to optimize a couple of my sites and they really showed me the in’s and out’s of optimizing.
Your article is a really good overview of good tips to anyone who would try to SEO their own website but, I think the best tip is to have a professional take care of it.
I tried every SEO techniques you posted for my website http://www.acenseo.com but its nowhere near first five pages in google search. Can you please help what else can i do???