This tutorial will not be meant as a one-stop, end-all, basically biblical type learning source. Instead, we’ll be listing the more important ones that everyone needs to be familiar with. We have to save something for our book.
The Heading Tags
The heading tags go from <h1> to <h6>.
<h1> defines the largest heading and <h6> defines the smallest heading. These should be used in the same hierarchy as shown with h1 being the title of your website or post, h2 being something else of great importance but not the most important, h3 being possibly the date and time the article was published, etc.
Use Keywords and Keyword Phrases Appropriately
Use keywords that actually match your website’s content. Don’t add a bunch of keywords in the webpage’s html, don’t add more than 7 keywords in the meta tags section, don’t pollute your links and images either with a bunch of keywords. Trust me, these tactics no longer work, and will cause your Page Rank to pretty much dissipate, and your SEO score based on any ranking method will be a joke.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are an important thing both for your website visitors and also search engine crawlers. There are two main types of sitemaps; The first sitemap is a XML file that resides on your web server, usually in the form of http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. This tells search engine spiders exactly what they should crawl and what not. This is the best way to avoid duplicate content. The second sitemap is a HTML/XHTML based page linking to each category or archive and then onto the posts that were posted inside of that category or archive. Essentially it gives the user the ability to find all available areas of content on your website.
Avoid Duplicate Content
Search Engines frown upon too much of the same content being crawled on your website. So, for example, you might have 20 posts on the main page of your website that are in the “icons” category. With that being the case, you might want to tell the search engines via the XML sitemap not to crawl or archive your category listing of all “icons” based posts.
What Is The Main Focus Of Your Website?
What is the main focus of your website? Is there a group of other websites similar to yours and can be categorized? Chances are your site can can categorized and the quicker you learn your place on the internet, within that categorized position, the quicker you can worry about things like traffic and backlinks.
Domain Expiration Date
I’ve read numerous articles containing this tip, yet I haven’t really seen it hit any sort of fame, or be tagged as a “must know”, but it’s an easy aspect of your website to change, and at the very least it will bring up your website’s SEO scores on various web software applications. The tip: Make sure your website has a year or longer remaining on the expiration. I’ve even read that Google leans on this factor when rating your website as well.
Check For Canonicalization Issues
Try to use and promote your website either with the www displayed or if you prefer the simpler domain.com approach. Another good idea would be to have one or the other re-direct to the domain listing you intend on using.
Good Related Content
Be sure to write content that ties in with your website’s category, or the general concept of your website. At the very least, make sure the content relates back to the keywords used in the meta tags.
Update Your Websites / Blogs
Try to add fresh content to your website / blog as much as possible. Search Engines love crawling websites that have a tendency to be updated with more relative content.
Make Sure Your Website Is Standardized
Make sure your HTML / XHTML files validate as proper code based on web standards set forth by w3.org.
From the official The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Website: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.
The More Backlinks, The Better
Try to gain as many backlinks as possible — That is, websites that link back to yours. This is arguably the single most important aspect of determining your website’s popularity and what to do next.
Ways to do this..
- Post comments on other blogs and put your domain in the signature.
- Similar to above, post threads and reply to threads on web based forums with your domain in the signature.
- Release some sort of free content – Templates, Icons, Knowledge.
- Submit your website to search engines.
- Submit your website to DMOZ.org. What is DMOZ.org? From DMOZ.org: The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.
- Update your blog often and with solid content.
Optimizing Post Titles
When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title. For example, if your website’s blog is called “indieblog”, it wouldn’t make sense to announce this on every single page. Instead, use a good topic sentence or so based on the article’s content, or if the page is an archive listing of everything posted in “Category 9″, maybe you would name the page.. “Archive Listing Of Category 9″ inside a <h2> heading.
Proper Website Navigation
Make sure your website is optimized as highly as possible for proper navigation. This means having a paged browsing method, some sort of post categorization, and some sort of post archiving. A HTML based Sitemap containing your web site’s directory or category structure with thorough links is a great thought. Not only does it help your viewers navigate, but it also helps search engine crawlers.
Ad-Systems
Make sure that if you use a particular advertising system such as Adwords, or Text-Link Ads, the system is designed with your website’s SEO rank in mind. Adwords of course will not hurt your SEO, because it’s a Google company; However, Text-Link Ads has in the past been known to hurt your SEO rank and PR (Page Rank).
The Social Bookmarking Phenomenon
Yes, this little section of the web, the social-bookmarking section, will go down in history as one more thing that greatly shifted and inspired the next generation of internet users.
The main ones I would suggest you join and post your blog’s content to are..
- Digg.com – Users can give 1 vote, or a digg, to show approval of your website or your website’s content.
- StumbleUpon – If a user or if you submit your content to StumbleUpon, and it’s a decent article, many others may also rate your stumble, and the ball really starts rolling from there. StumbleUpon can bring in tons of traffic, all aimed at just one blog post.
- ma.gnolia – ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking website. The layout, the way the content is spread around seems incredibly elegant, but I don’t think it does it the most efficiently. So far StumbleUpon is a tough one to out-do.
- Delicious.com or Del.icio.us (as it once were), is probably the most popular and oldest of the social bookmarking websites. It was bought out by Yahoo, but the website and its goals haven’t changed dramatically.
Really very informative article
Thank you for the compliment.
To the social bookmarking section, I would add: Diigo. AFAIK a greater feature set than the others listed.
Yeah, I enjoy using Diigo, but in my own personal experiences, I’ve never generated much traffic with Diigo. The user interface is nice though, and perhaps the traffic issue is more my fault due to not being a bigger part of the ‘Diigo community’.
Thanks for the comment and the resource.
> traffic
OK, I never thought of that aspect.
As I dislike intrusive traffic in my e-mail Inbox,
so I enjoy the non-disruptive nature of Diigo. (It’s likely that my use of, preferences within Diigo are set to keep things pleasantly quiet whilst I’m busy.)
That we do not *see* traffic occurring does not mean that there is no/low traffic.
(The people and tags that I watch overtly http://www.diigo.com/watch/grahamperrin are just a fraction of what I watch discreetly.)
If I wished to generate traffic, I might use the features to draft/post, periodically and/or on demand, from Diigo to blog.
> community
To me, this was most interesting.
For a few years: whilst I bookmarked heavily in social environments (including Diigo), I never thought of myself as a social bookmarker. In fact, I was very resistant to the social aspect — probably because I was wary of the whole caboodle becoming as disruptive as e-mail or Facebook.
August 2008: I began using, then began recommending, Diigo for group/project work (research and other environments). This involved rigourous testing and feedback, and IMHO Diigo do pay careful attention to suggestions from many end users with diverse use cases.
(When a response is not immediate, when adoption of a suggestion is not immediate, it’s usually because there’s a bigger picture: so the wishes of multiple users are rolled into something cohesive and forward-looking.)
November 2008: unexpectedly, I lowered my guard to the ’social’ in social bookmarking, and now I positively enjoy the social aspect, it’s never a chore.
Recent subtle, minor changes to the application of highlights, sticky notes and page comments — in Diigo groups — led to remarkable, major improvements in group work and I’m generally very happy with the service.
Best,
Graham
Very nice, thank you for your experiences.
If you’d like to add JungleJar as a friend on Diigo, please do. Our username, as you may have guessed, is JungleJar.
I really liked your blog! I just added you to my bookmarked. Keep up the good work.
Would this always happen?
Very well-done information. I think im gonna stick around and read about 4 more of your posts. Wishing you the best
I love your blog and have been a lurker for a while now. Keep up the good content.