SEO Tips — putting time, energy and thought into the content on each web page is what counts. Content delivers the search engine results you deserve.
SEO Tips: Web page content and search results
The content is the most important part of a website. What good is a website that does not offer something interesting, informative or useful? It must also be well designed, so that finding your way around the site is easy.
Content and links that are repetitive and misleading should be avoided.
Each web page should have content on it that is different from the other pages that make up the website.
Some websites include content that is called 'linkbait'. This has to be something interesting enough to get people’s attention and it can be a positive contribution to the site. There are a many ways to go about adding link bait. You may work hard to generate interesting data or insights or something more creative. If you say something controversial, this can generate discussion. It is worth putting in some effort and being creative with content to give people a reason to link to you.
When people search, they keep it simple, using a few keywords or phrases and Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL use algorithms to bring up relevant search results. The order the results appear is affected by page ranking. Page ranking is affected by ALL of the content on a web page and the incoming links (or 'backlinks'). The number of incoming links is an indication of the popularity or importance of a website or web page.
The snippet (a description of or an excerpt from the web page displayed in search results) is a search engine's algorithmic attempt to extract the part of the page that is most relevant to a query. The 'snippet' will quickly make up someone's mind as to whether or not they click the cached link and go to that page.
By working on the content on a web page, you directly affect the snippet that will be generated by a search engine.
Web authors and contributors have to consider what a human may type in a search field to find information and how their web page will be indexed and searched by robots that crawl the internet.
If a content management system is being used to publish content on a web page, contributors who use the system will have an affect on the ranking. They should take advantage of all the controls available within the CMS to make a positive influence on the web page ranking.
SEO Tips: Keywords and web page titles
The most important keywords for each page should appear in the 'title' as well as the content of the page itself. Titles should be kept short and be as descriptive as possible.
In the title the most important keywords should be first. Keyword stuffing should be avoided (otherwise you risk reducing the ranking). Words such as 'and' or 'in' do not need to appear in web page titles. You can use commas, hyphens or colons to separate words or groups of words. Some search engines will only include the first 40 or 50 characters of the page title. So, limiting the page title to 40 characters or less is a good SEO strategy.
SEO Tips: Incoming links affect ranking
Incoming links from high ranking web pages have a positive affect on the ranking of your web pages. These are the important links you want to have to improve your ranking with search engines.
You don't need to link to a lot of websites. You need good websites to link to you. If some of those links include the keywords that describe the page they're linking to, these are the best links to have.
Good SEO is about building a high quality, accessible website with great copy, using keywords in appropriate places, and getting quality links 'naturally' because people like your content.
Paying for advertising on a high ranking relevant website is another way to make a difference to the traffic your site receives. Links on specialised websites, directories and magazines for your trade or industry will attract visitors. Other ways to tackle website marketing include pay-per-click schemes, Google AdWords and Sponsored Links.
Google 'Sponsored Links' are shown in a column on the right side (and sometimes also in a coloured box above the search results). 'Sponsored' means the results are pulled from Googe's advertising network.