The Ten Commandments of SEO or How To Get Top
Rankings
1. Provide high quality content that people search for.
This is the most important of all
the commandments. Without high quality content you can’t perform high quality
SEO.
What is high quality content? It’s
useful informative content that will provide a benefit to your users. Be
imaginative. Think about what would be useful or interesting to you, and write
about it with passion. Provide tables of data, photographs, or video clips if
it will benefit the visitor. Product reviews and comparisons, travel tips and
reviews, home security issues. The list is endless, so find and or create lots
of high quality content for your site.
2. Provide a large quantity of content.
Ten-page websites do not impress
Google. Have at least 100 pages of original content. Each page should have
400-600 words in the body text. Lots of pages gives you lots of opportunities
for unique long-tailed keyword phrases. Lots of pages of related material lets
Google know that you are an authority site.
3. Do extensive keyword research
Do not waste your time and web
page real estate by targeting keyword phrases that no one searches for. Use a
keyword research tool and find the top 100 long-tailed keyword phrases being
used to find material similar to yours, and use them in your page elements like
title tags, description tag, body text etc.
4. Use your page title and meta description tags
properly and effectively
When creating content for your
pages use your title tags to describe your content incorporating your keyword
phrases. Write it for humans! Use the description tag for a longer more
detailed version of the title, and include portions of the keyword phrases where
appropriate when being read by humans. The description is often used with the
title on the search engine results pages, so write it to attract the searcher to
your site.
5. Meta keywords tag
The search engines pretty much
ignore the meta keywords tag now days.
But go ahead and put into the
keywords meta tag four to eight keyword phrases that appear in your body text.
Some smaller engines still use it, and Google might check it for abuse even
though they do not seem to use it for ranking.
6. Use heading tags in your body text
Use an H1 tag for your on-page
title in only one place, an H2 tag in one place for a brief description of the
material on the page, an H3 tag in one place for another important idea or
concept related to the overall page material.
Then for the body text use H4,H5,
and H6 heading tags for your important keyword rich sub headings. Using the
headings in subheadings not only makes it easier for visitors to skim to where
they see something interesting, it gives Google additional information about how
to determine what value to place on your page and site.
7. Use your image alt tags properly
Use your image alt tags to
describe the image, adding keyword phrases if they make sense in the context of
the image.
Do not stuff keywords or keyword
phrases into places they should not be. Make your text sound normal to humans.
Do not use the base keyword phrase over and over in identical form. If possible
change it up, add a word, take a word away, change the order, and make it seem
as though written by a human, not a machine.
8. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools!
Create a sitemap and submit it to
Google. Google’s Webmaster tools find errors on your site for you and provide
lots of help for SEO. Google shows you links to your pages, internal links, and
even the top searches that result in visitors. All kinds of very useful info for
serious SEO is available right at Google, and who better to listen to about SEO?
9. Use descriptive keywords in your file and directory names
Using
a keyword or two in your file names and your directory names could be that extra
little push you need to get to #1. Don’t keyword stuff them, just a word or two
from a primary keyword phrase sprinkled in with descriptive directory and file
names can make a difference.
10. Get inbound links!
External links to your site are
extremely important if you want to be a player in the rankings game. Google
relies heavily on the link popularity for a site when it figures the ranking.
Try to work your keyword phrases into the anchor text pointing to your site.
One way to pickup good links is by publishing articles to the article
directories. You are allowed to link back to your site, and you can write
whatever anchor text you want for the links.