A Refresher on Search Engine Optimization

October 10th, 2012

Your website, blog, articles and other online materials should be easily crawled by search engines to provide better visibility on the web. While, a part of SEO is automatic, you need to work hard to rank top on the SERPs. Only, tactful search engine optimization can do the trick. You can hire professionals to do this or can educate yourself on the know-how of how the search engine works to find web pages.

Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing your site to get listed on the web is a must, failing which the site will get lost in the web and the purpose of promoting your brand on the web will not be served.

On-Page Optimization

Employ techniques that would directly enhance the web pages. Building a content rich website is the first step towards it. Incorporate text to your images, flash and videos to make the site more search engine friendly. This is because search engines prefer reading text.

Next, your HTML codes should be absolutely free of errors. This is not about the grammatical or spell errors, but the errors while writing the program in HTML. Consider running the final code through HTML and CSS validators.

Create relevant title tags in the site and avoid content duplication within the site. Do periodic keyword analysis of your website and avoid stuffing each page with too many keywords. Make sure you remove hidden text from the body of your web pages. Major search engines will blacklist pages that contain hidden text.

Off-Page Optimization

This includes techniques that are not implemented on the web pages directly. This refers to techniques such as quality link building exchange methods that ensures quality links on your web page.

Consider click density methods to increase the rankings of your web page. A more concise HTML meta tag will help you in achieving the same.

Write articles relevant to your web pages and submit them to various portals like blogs, discussion forums, directories etc.  However, the articles should be extremely relevant to attract quality visitors to the site. Submit your web pages to various directories with a brief description. Segment the pages in proper categories with proper anchor text and it will have rich chances of getting noticed.

Today, a site’s SEO ranking greatly depends on its social media presence. Focus on building a genuine base of followers on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Make use of discussion forums in LinkedIn and try to create authentic user-generated content to drive traffic and improve visibility.

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