A Quick Search Engine Optimization Review...

Happy New Year everyone! I was recently researching some SEO basics and thought I would summarize them here for everyone's enjoyment! Well, let's jump in...

1. Your page's TITLE tag is the most important single thing. Write your title containing the keywords you want to target for the given page and keep the total length to around 60-70 characters.
   
   
2. The next most important thing are your HEADER tags (ie: H1, H2, etc). You should have only ONE H1 tag and it should generally match your TITLE tag or at the very least nearly match it such that it contains similar keywords. You can use H2 tags for secondary headers, and H3 tags as well, but the value diminishes quickly beyond the main H1 tag.
   
   
3. Use your keywords in the text copy of your webpage. This sounds simple, but it can be a bit more complicated than you think. It's VERY IMPORTANT that you frequently use your keywords within your content, especially towards the beginning. It's also important to repeat the keywords once at the end and if the page is long add another reference in the middle somewhere.
   
   
4. Text enhancements like BOLD and ITALIC should be used sparingly to highlight a keyword term where appropriate and they can help boost its ranking a bit.
   
   
5. META Tags aren't as critical as they used to be and only the DESCRIPTION meta tag is really used anymore. This META Description is often used in the search engine results and should contain the keywords used in your TITLE and H1 tags.
   
   
6. Use TEXT LINKS within your website to link from page to page. Using fancy graphical links is detrimental to your search engine rankings as search engine spiders index text links better. So consider using other CSS styling for your main navigation so that you can leave it as text links.
   
   
7. Here's the hardest part, but one of the most important tips... You need relevant links to your website from other related websites, especially if they're "high authority" websites. For example, if I ran a news site, getting a link to my site or news articles from a site like CNN.com would be HUGE!
   
   
8. Add and update your website regularly. The search engines like to see sites that are keeping their content fresh and adding to the site. Consider adding new pages on a regular basis or perhaps integrate some dynamic content to help keep your site updated automatically.

There's certainly a lot more to overall SEO and performing these tips on your website can require a lot of planning to do well, but the end result can be well worth it. We've recently achieved several first-page placements on Google for a couple clients just by following some of these basic tips! So make sure you're at least covering the basics or call us to see how we can help you out...

Sincerely,
-Aaron

Aaron M. Soto
Partner / Consultant
DezTech Consulting LLC, since 1998
Move Your Business FORWARD!
http://www.deztech.com