The 52 Top SEO Tips – here are 10 of them

The 52 Top SEO Tips – here are 10 of them
By David Leonhardt

From the obvious to the "Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before", here are 10 of the top 52 tips on how to optimize your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up the search engine rankings.

Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site. Here is an example of deep linking, in this case to my personal happiness workbook.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Article exchanges. You've heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else's article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text. Don't overdo the anchor text. You don't want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation – something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, "Gumbo Pudding Pop" occasionally, "Get gumbo pudding pops" as well, "Gumbo-flavored pudding pops" some other times, etc.

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?

There you have it: 10 of the 52 Top SEO Tips, a free tip sheet that comes with Don't Get Banned By the Search Engines:

There is a lot more to search engine optimization, and there are always more details when looking at an individual site. But these tips should help any website significantly improve its rankings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Leonhardt is a freelance writer, and an online and offline publicity specialist. Contact him at Info@TheHappyGuy.com or visit his The Happy Guy website. Pick up a copy of Get In The News or learn how to promote your website with an ezine or newsletter.

Can anyone elaborate on the section "First come, first served."? I've been reading this board for awhile and I don't think I've heard that before but then again I could of just been completely oblivious to it.

If you place 100 links on your home page, for example, all to other-page.html, the search engine spiders will only follow one. They don't need to re-index the same page over and over, so they don't follow duplicate links. You can't spam them this way.

Spiders read your source code from top to bottom. They don't see the page's layout, they just follow the source code.

So if you have multiple links from your home page (or any other page) to other-page.html, make sure the first of those links is optimized the way you would want the engines to see it.

That basically means to make sure text links are coded first instead of image links as Google will place more weight on anchor text than an images. Example:

A page has an image linked to your home page and a text link to your home page (same URL). If Google finds your image link first it'll discard the text link because Google only counts the same link once from each page therefore you wont get as much weight from the image link as you would from the text link. Make the text link closer to the <*body> tag so Google will count that one and discard the image link.

I do have to disagree with "Multiple domains" as you have to collect backlinks all over again AND you can get dinged for crosslinking. But again it all depends on your market and site category.

Hello All..

I nocied the post about the linking and the spiders following your links.

QUick question.
I have setup a drop down menu on this site with an external .js file so my index page isn't full of horrible html.

http://www.hongluck.org/TEMP/hongluck/

I also put text links to the important pages which I want the various spiders to index and spider.

Have I done this right?
Will the spiders index only my text links at the bottom b/c of the type of menu system I've designed?

Thanks

CBR

You got it critter. The only links I see that will be followed are the ones at the bottom

About us | History | Styles | Training | Lion Dance | Gallery | Resources

All your links in your menu will be ignored as Google doesn't follow javascript.

PERFECT
exactly what I want

THANKS PK

Well off to redesign, I'm glad I'm just starting my new site :-)
I can't believe I never caught this little tidbit before. I run a couple of Ecom Sites and I always put the photo above a text link with a link in both, for design and Navigation reasons, and never even thought it could be a bad thing.

Thanks Again

Thanks for posting that David.

Any more you're willing to share?

I have plenty of sites with top liniks being graphics and it does not seem to effect google this is the first time I heard of this?

Really OptiWizard??? Text links are said to have more weight to Google PLUS you can use your keywords in the link similar to backlink anchor text. I would love to see what rank you'd be with text links.

I do have text links I have both
but usually the text links are on the bottom of the page

Are you using javascript for the images to do rollovers or are they just img tags with href tags?

NO java but if it will help I am going to add java now...
Only on the homepage right?