SEO Tips, SEO Techniques

By Dave Young, Professional Writer and Founder, Young Copy

Below are the four SEO Tips and SEO Techniques extracted from the SEO Revealed: The Basics article Young Copy recently published in Ping! Zine magazine.

You can view the full PDF article at SEO Revealed: The Basics.

Four SEO Tips and SEO Techniques Basics

There are four SEO basics every company can do to help push their rankings to the top.

• Identify Key Phrases
• Proper HTML Tags
• Insert Optimized Content Links
• Implement A Sitemap

Identifying Key Phrases

Identifying key phrases will be the most important aspect of your entire SEO strategy. Key phrases are crucial to the development of your site’s content and search engine rankings. In fact, you will spend most of your time researching and identifying key phrases that match what your prospects are using in the search engines to find your products and services.

Use well defined key phrases instead of one or two broad keywords, unless your keyword(s) have very little competition. Typically people use multiple keywords when searching for a product or service. For example, instead of using “conversion rates” you would use “increase website conversion rates” as your key phrase.

Proper SEO HTML Tags

Once you have identified your key phrases, implement them properly in your HTML tags. There are only four areas you need to address:

• Title Tag
• Meta Tags
• H1 Tag
• Footer Tag

These tags are easy to modify. In the next section,I provide you with examples of each tag so you can copy and paste them in the html code of your website.

Defining SEO HTML Tags

Title Tag - Use your key phrase, never put your company name first. You can include the name, but put it last with a dash like “Increase Website Conversion Rates – Company Z.”

<title>Increase Website Conversion Rates – Company Z</title>

Meta Tags – Not all search engines utilize Meta tags. However, you should still implement Meta tags to get the most out of your SEO campaign. The three basic Meta tags are description, keywords, and robots. Try to use a variation of your key phrase in your description and keywords tags. Always use the robots tag so spiders will crawl all pages linked to your optimized page.

<meta name=”description” content=”Increase website conversion rates with proper website
content analysis.” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”increase website conversion rates, site conversion rates” />
<meta name=”robots” content=”INDEX, FOLLOW” />

H1 Tag – Make sure you have an H1 Tag on every page you want to optimize. The H1 tag must use the bold tag and your key phrase should be listed first, just like your Title tag.

<h1><b>Higher Conversion Rates</b></h1>

Footer Tag – The same key phrase you used in your Title and H1 tags should be displayed last on your page.

Insert Optimized Content Links

Search engines rank sites based on the quality of their content. Quality content means your site contains information that will educate your visitors. The more information you give your visitors, the more they will stay on your site or will continue to revisit your site. Visitors, like search engines, will view your site as an “authority” on your particular subject matter. But to become an authority site, your content needs to contain optimized links that link to information across your website.

Use a variation of your key phrase and link your content links to related pages. For example, if you have a page optimized for “increase website conversion rates,” you could link to a page explaining conversion rates.

<a href=”conversion_rates.htm”>conversion rates</a>

If you already have content links integrated, make sure you do not saturate your content, otherwise you could be penalized. If a search engine penalizes your site, your rankings will fall.

You should also optimize your filenames. In the content link above, I used “conversion_rates.htm”
as the filename. The more you can implement variations of your key phrases across multiple pages or relevant information, spiders will crawl those sites and consider your site an authority.

Implement A Sitemap

Every site, regardless of size, should have a sitemap. The link to your sitemap should be easily identifiable to your visitors. A sitemap will help your visitors get to information quickly. Even if your site’s navigation ranks among the best, you should still use a sitemap.

Beyond just another way for visitors to find information on your site, search engines, especially Google, will spider your sitemap, its links, and follow the corresponding pages. Assuming you have developed the right key phrases and implemented the tag elements described earlier, your site will achieve higher search engine rankings. Keep in mind it will take anywhere from a few days to several weeks for your site to appear higher in search engines. And that depends on how often the spiders crawl your site.

You can view the full PDF article at SEO Revealed: The Basics.