Top Ten SEO Tricks to Get Traffic to your Business (Classes Coming)
The Search Marketing Team (SMT), a Portland SEO company, will be hosting a series of classes tailor made for small business owners who would like to take better control of their site’s ranking.
The classes, Beginner SEO I and Beginner SEO II will be held most Wednesdays at 7 p.m., and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the NHBA. Please visit www.thesmt.com for more information, and to RSVP (required)
In addition, the SMT is sharing this Top Ten list (below) which includes several of the items that will be covered in the classes:
Top Ten SEO Tips:
1. Keyword research – figure out the words used by people you want to visit your site.
• These are generic search terms, NOT the proper name of your company
• Use free tools such as Google’s Keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. From the beginning:
• Use one of these keywords each time you name a new web page or post
• Use one of these keywords each time you name a new photo you intend to upload
• Use one of these keywords in the TITLE tag for your page (in HTML)
• Use one of these keywords in the META description tag for your page (in HTML)
• Use one of these keywords in any subheads you have in your copy
• Use one of these keywords in the FIRST and LAST sentences of your copy (when possible)
• Use one of these keywords in the FOOTER of your page
• And whenever possible, put these keyword in Bold and Italics and Capitalize the First Letter of Each Word
3. Build a website that is easy for the search engines to understand
• Make sure you have a robots.txt saved at the root level of your domain
• Make sure you have a sitemap.xml saved at the root level of your domain
4. Build clear text links (or a menu or HTML version of your sitepmap) to all parts of your site.
5. Backlinks:
• Links and “Likes” are like votes for your site and you can’t rank well without them
• Backlinks must be relevant to the content of your site and they must be from reputable websites
• Backlinks must be DoFollow, many sites only offer NoFollow links, which do you no good because they are not “counted” by the big three search engines
• Whenever possible, make sure you are using one of your keywords as the “anchor text” in your link
• Backlink to a variety of pages on your site, not just your main, or home, page
6. Submit your site details to search engines:
• Google, Yahoo and Bing all have a facility to submit a list of all the pages in your site via your sitemap
• Do not use automatic submission software
7. Content is king:
• Build great content and keep it up to date each week (or every day in competitive markets)
• This is the key to good SEO
• Search engines love sites like blogs, which are topical and regularly updated
• Regularly upload new photos and/or videos
8. Be social:
• Every time you update your site, be sure to mention it on Facebook, Twitter and sites like these
• The more friends and followers you attract to your site, the larger your reach becomes
• Place Google’s new +1, Facebook, Twitter and other social badges in an unobtrusive, but visible place on your site for more “likes”
9. Get crawled:
• One great way to make sure your site is indexed after you post something fresh is to “ping” it
• For this we use www.pingler.com
10. Watch your back:
• Pay close attention to your closest competition
• In all browsers there is an option to “View Source” which will display their source code
• Look for their and description and keyword tags
• These will show you what they are targeting and this can help you adjust your SEO as needed
Common BlackHat Don’ts:
1. Keyword Stuffing – Placing a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase on your page.
2. Hidden Text – Text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it or hiding text behind an image.
3. Cloaking – Presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see.
4. Doorway Pages – Pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor.
5. Redirects – This isn’t always bad, but when used as a black-hat tactic it is most commonly paired with doorway pages with little or no substantial content.
When in doubt, err on the side of caution and follow Google’s Quality Guidelines:
1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
2. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.
4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
5. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
6. Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
7. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
8. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.