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Keywords

Keywords can be repeated throughout your site, be placed in meta tags, and are one of the best ways to get higher rankings. Putting keywords in the title tag, in urls,and in page names are all good places to start. Keywords should be relavent to your site content and theme. You can find a list of good primary and secondary keyword choices on google which will also help  you tweeze a few good ones out of your a pre-existing site.

Search engines are pretty smart these days and know when we’re trying to trick them so making sure you only have around 3 to 7% of the page made up of major keywords, and only 1-2% of the page of minor keywords is best. If you have over 10% of keywords on a page it is suspicious and looks a lot like keyword stuffing, a technique that can get you banned from Search Engines and is terrible for SEO.

Putting keywords in your anchor text (especially on incoming links) is also important for SEO. This promotes both your site and the keyword in particular. Putting keywords in heading tags (<H1>, <H2>,< H3>…) can also count alot but make sure you page has actual text around the keywords.

Putting keywords in the -alt- tags of images is important since browser spiders can’t crawl images.

Keywords in metatags is becoming less and less important especially for google but is still important for other search engines so filling in these tags doesn’t hurt either.

One last tip with keywords: Secondary keywords can get a great response. Since everybody is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition when you optimize for secondaries. This can translate into more hits for you.

Some techniques that work against you when working with keywords are keyword dilution which is where you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially un-related ones and keyword stuffing, where you artificially inflate your keyword density.

Links

There are several factors to think about when dealing with links and SEO. Everysite will have outbound links but more importantly are the links coming into your site from other places. It’s best to have reputable sites that have a good googleranking link to your site. It’s also good if the links include one of your keywords in the anchor text. Links from sites with similar content to yours is also a good thing. It shows that you are poular among your topical community. Links from .edu and .gov sites are highly valued as these sites are very reputable and it’s more difficult to get listed on these sites.

Other elements to consider with links are the number of back links to your site but again the reputability of that site matters and their anchor text, and age of the link also come into play. The text before and around the anchor text is important and speaks to the relevance of the link and generally the older the link the better as getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.

Links from directories can help. Being listed in yahoo directory, and google business for example can be a great boost to your ranking. The fewer links on the page referring to you the better as it suggests your link is important.

Using named anchors, the target for internal links can help SEO by stressing the importance of a particular page, paragraph, or text.

Techniques that hurt your SEO: Outbound links to link farms or suspicious sites are terrible for SEO. You should regularly check the status of the sites you link to. Cross linking is when site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and site C links back to site A. This can be far more complex but appears as a disguised form of reciprocal link trading and is frowned upon. Also, single pixel links are TERRIBLE for SEO! They are invisible to humans so nobody will click on it and it’s obviously an SEO manipulation tactic.

Metatags

Although becoming more irrelevant they still serve their purpose and certain metatags should still be used. The most important is the <description> and <keywords> tags. <Description> is for the description of your site and sometimes pops up in the search results.  <keywords> should only use 10 to 20 keywords at the most.  Make sure the keywords used are on the page. The <Language> metatag is good if your site language specific.

Content

Having unique content which is site relevant is great boost for your rankings.  Frequent changes of content is favored which is great when you add new content but not so good when you only make small changes to existing content.

The keyword fontsize is important as the bigger <h1><h2> etc… the better. You can also stress importance with bolded or italicized keywords. Recent documents are also favored. Poor code and design won’t get you bad but may make your site less indexable and should be avoided. Illegal content also gets you kicked out of search engines. Invisible text is a strike against as it’s obviously a trick to stuff keywords.

Other elements that affect your SEO are JavaScript, which should be used wisely and not randomly. It’s harder for spiders to follow and if it’s a mess they get confused, Text in images might be an easy way to get the pretty layout you’re after, but it is really bad for SEO. Using an <alt> tag to describe images is a good start but make sure the images are relevant. Frames are terrible! Avoid them at all costs. Flash content is ok when used correctly. It is still not indexable but with an alt tag you can at least describe it. A flash home page is terrible for SEO and should be avoided if you want high search engine standing. Using keyword rich URL’s, and filenames is good for seo so definitely use SEO Friendly Links when working with Joomla! or WordPress or any CMS.  Generating a sitemap is also great for spiders and is really easy to do with google’s webmaster tools.

Hopefully these tips will help with your rankings, but remember that SEO is a process and it doesn’t happen over night!