Ultimate SEO – Crank up your site!

There are several tips and tricks in cranking up your site with search engines when it comes to SEO. First is to understand how search engines work, what they are looking for and what you need to crank up your site! Let me first start off by saying that if anyone comes to you and guarantees top placement in the search engines, you better get this in writing before ever attempting to hire them.

With the right tools and the know how, you CAN crank up your own search engine rankings.

Why am I telling you this? Well I was tested along time ago by a web developer and software maker by an interview. I was asked….can you guarantee top search engine rankings without going to pay per ads? I said ….no. I can not guarantee them top placement. They hired me cause they knew this was the truth.

However today many developers won’t tell you there are tools and things you can do yourself (in a content management system) that will help you gain search engine rankings. Thats right! I am going to tell you how to you can crank up your search engine rankings, IF you follow these instructions.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Best tips on how to optimze your site.

Think like your audience! – Site down and write down a list of keywords AND phrases that you would like your audience to find you under when searching on the web. Use these!

Title your pages relevant to the content – Titles of your pages are what search engines see when they ‘crawl your site” – you can use location, sentence, keywords, etc…as long as it isn’t TO long (don’t write a paragraph for your title – keep it simple, direct and to the point).

Description – Write a brief description for each page of your site. Remember to use relevant content that is on your page and use of your keywords and / or phrases that you made on your list.

Keywords and Key Phrases – people usually find information by typing in key phrases. If someone is hunting for a red viper sports car for sale….thats what they usually type in…not “viper”. They can get more specific results by typiing in key phrases than they can simply a word at a time. Use this when you want them to find you a specific way.

Content – More, more, more..and keep it going! Search engines today look and ‘crawl’ site that are updated and have fresh content all the time. Lets look at simple and top web sites on the market today. Facebook, twitter, youtube, blogger, wordpress, social networking sites. How did they become so popular? They have fresh content added to them all the time! You need to keep ongoing and fresh content on your site all the time. If this is just news about your company, a birthday of an employee, new product just out on the market or anything really that you can keep going on your web site, this is what you NEED to do. I can’t stress this enough!

Photos and Graphics – When you are going to optimize your site for search engines…don’t forget your graphics and photos. Just me renaming photos on a site has drastically increased search engine rankings! NAME your photos that are relevant to your site! Search engines can NOT see what your photos are of. Seriously! Everything is coded to search engines! They see what we put into the site. So if you are going to use a photo called img124.jpg….well that is what the seach engines sees….IMG124 and that the jpg is the image format. Take the time and rename your photos…red-viper.jpg or red-viper-large.jpg – NOW the search engines KNOW what that is a picture of! The more relevant your pictures are to the content of your site…the higher your rankings will be when search engines crawl and review your site! DO NOT leave spaces between words! Use a dash or underscore ALWAYS in naming photos! Leaving a space can cause a broken image in some browsers or spaces will be replaced by a 20% to the search engines. Give your pictures titles and descriptions!

Stop with the mile high web pages! – The more content you put on a page and try to enter in all your keywords on a single page isn’t good. Let me tell you why. Most search engines crawl your site to index your pages by reading the content and links to follow and only do this by crawling a certain way down your page. Your main content on your site should be what users pull up as soon as they SEE the window without even scrolling down. I have seen pages and pages that go on forever and are divided up into certain categories on that ONE page. It is better that you divide up this content and create other pages on your site. The more pages indexed by search engines, the more you will rank higher

Look for more SEO tips and Tricks to help you rank higher with search engines in the Web Talk for my clients.

Lyn Coggins (43 Posts)

Lyn Coggins is owner of cWebArt, Graphic and web designer since 2001. She is located in Hendersonville NC near Asheville. Offering web site design, graphic art, training, business consulting and tutorials for web site businesses and WordPress users.