5 Essential Things to Know About SEO

From the very start of the Internet era, the first and foremost challenge which we all are facing is how to attract qualified visitors to a site. The days has gone past when only populating and stuffing keywords in META tags and Title tags were enough to rank high on the search engines. Massive funding and buying links is not going to work now as well, these all seems old stories now as search engines has grown much mature now. These all practices also sound unethical in true nature of business.

As an SEO lover, with ambitions of experimenting with all possible things and knowing the results has let me to share you with something very beneficial. If you can give more time than money, believe me, you can beat much of the competition in the market and you will stand distinguishable from the others in your area. The outcome of these trial and error techniques sets the foundation of our SEO efforts and the basis for the constant growth of traffic to website.

Top Factors to Rank High in Search Engines

Most people think that PageRank is the only factor to rank high in search engines but Google uses many parameters of a site to rank search results. Google uses many signals to calculate the rank of a page. I have concluded the most common factors in best practices implementation for search engine optimization. This is a quick checklist against which you can benchmark your website.

• Use of Keywords in Title tag and their relevancy
• Text contained in the anchors of incoming links
• Unique and quality Content
• Global link popularity of a website
• Linking structure within the site itself
• Relevancy of inbound links
• Use of Keywords in main content area of the pages
• Use of keywords in Meta tags and their relevancy to content
• Global link popularity of linking sites
• Proper and controlled keyword stuffing in content
• Use of alt tags in images
• Professional website design
• W3C compliant (see W3C guidelines for details)
• Fast server response
• Age of website
• Fresh content
• RSS feeds for readers
• Magazine subscriptions for increasing relevant traffic
• Social media bookmarking
• Blogging

Title Optimization – make your titles SEO friendly for higher SERP

One of the most important factors that consider your success of website depends on how Titles are made. There is no doubt that Title should represent the main theme of the body or page on which it is displayed but there are other factors too; that should be taken into consideration while building them for achieving higher SERP (Search Engine Result Position) and making them SEO friendly. We will look into each of it in detail.

Title optimization and density / relevancy factor

First thing to be considered while creating title tags for any page is to check the relevancy factor. By relevancy we mean how close or relevant is the title to its content, just as Story heading represents the main theme of the content inside it. Title tag should represent the core theme or idea of any webpage. It is also very natural to represent the title on the basis of its main theme. Another important thing that SEO guy should consider is that a reasonable amount of words should be present in the content area which are mentioned in title tag. Suppose this page as an example, see the title tag and then count each word individually. Title is the first word in heading, and it is repeated several times in this page without loosing the context, next is Optimization which is again repeated with considerable amount. You can count the rest and will find that density is very important while making these tags. As a rule of thumb, your title tag keywords should occupy 5 – 10 % of the whole content. You will find some people, emphasizing this ratio to be around 20 – 25 % but I recommend it to be under 15% for best results.

Include your main keywords in internal links

Second important thing to boost your PR (page rank) is to have at least one internal link coming to this page with main keywords present in the link. This link should not be confused with the left or right panel links which most sites have, rather it’s an internal link that should point from content of any other existing webpage of your site. This link should have at least one main keyword which is also present in title tag.

Make your Title tags attractive to people

Titles are shown in result pages displayed by search engines whenever queried, and they are the very first thing that got prominent when people read them in those results. So if you don’t have relevant words and appealing keywords for which the visitor is looking for, you are gone. Also not try to rush for main keywords because the competition is very tight in those keywords, instead start with less competitive keywords to get higher position. For more detail on this, study the topic of long tails.

Few Precautions in Title Optimization:

Avoid duplicate Title Tags: Don’t put same title tag in other pages of your website. This will greatly reduce your content’s quality and search engines will consider it duplicate text and will reduce the points for those pages having duplicate tags, some search engines handle it very strictly.
Don’t cross the density limit: Few people propagate their main title keywords all over the page to game the search engines and get instant results. This is very dangerous and you can be penalized by major search engines by doing so and all your optimization efforts will spoil, so only provide quality content and don’t exceed 30 % density limit for your keywords.
Don’t make titles very long: Your title tag should not be very long. 3 – 15 words long Title is OK. Don’t make titles to read like a long sentence. If you need long titles in some situation, try to separate them with hyphens.
Put your company name at the start: Include your company name in Title tags to make them unique, this will also help you in branding your products. Try to put it on the very start of it. If you wish to include your company name in each and every page of your website, try following the same pattern throughout the whole site.

We have seen many websites with great content but with no visibility to the world, because they didn’t handled Title tags properly or somehow they put very little attention to this factor while implementing SEO. If you can focus on the points discussed in this article, you can enjoy higher search engine rankings and improvements in very short time.