Quick SEO Tips For Your Website
Nov
02
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is something that is of great importance to web designers (or at least should be, haha). It determines whether or not your new website will even be found on the web! What good is a great looking website if nobody ever comes across it? It goes without saying that as web designers, we should be focusing on SEO to ensure our clients are getting the attention they need, and the same for ourselves.
SEO recently very quickly became something I paid much more attention too, and it has been paying off this far! Here is a few different things that I’ve learned along the way that have helped me in a great way, and hopefully they can do the same for you.
Now if you are running a WordPress blog, a lot of these techniques are made easy for you through the form of plugins. Particularly the All In One SEO Pack for WordPress is definitely a must have for all WordPress users. It lines out many elements of SEO in a simple to fill out preferences page.
So without any more delay, here are my SEO tips:
Page Titles
Page titles are a very important part in search engines finding your website. The keywords in the page title are of some of the most important thoughout your whole website. The thing here is that you also want to keep it simple and to the point. Don’t drag it out too long, but make sure you include what it is that your website is about, along with the name of the website.
My recommended format is ‘Page Description | Website Name’. This puts the important keywords that your industry determines first and then your own brand name afterwards.
Keeping a consistent format thoughout your website can help quite a bit as well. Either just adding a Page title in front of the format I recommended, or just replacing the page description with a page title would both work well.
Headings & Lists
The next most important thing involved in SEO for your website is obviously the content. The robots scan your website for all the keywords it can find, but it does indeed SCAN your website. Headlines and lists are the most prominent in importance to the search engines, they check these first and dig deeper in to the paragraphs later on.
An easy way to make sure your website stays SEO friendly without trying too hard to cram in keywords everywhere is the just keep scanability in mind. Most users on the internet do not read everything that is on the screen, they look over headlines, lists, excerpts, pullquotes, etc, and read further when something catches them.
Search robots can work the same way. Keeping the important information about your website in the areas that are most likely to be seen can be an easy way to make sure everything is working together nicely, and can guarantee nicely written content.
Links
Links can have a lot to do with your SEO ranking. The content of a site that you link to can add strength to your website. You don’t want to overload your website with outbound links though, it’s neccessary according to search engines ( and myself as well ) to include your own content on the website as well as links.
Providing relevant title tags on the outbound links and ensuring that the content being linked to is relevant to your website will both help your search ranking quite well. What is more important than outbound links, are inbound links. The more websites on the internet that link to your website, the more prominence you have in search!
Some easy ways to get your website and brand out on the internet more without spamming everyone are available using social media. Advertising your own blog posts on Twitter is always a good idea, and submitting to news or design news collection websites such as Script & Style.
One other tip is to simply communicate! Participate in discussions in your industry’s community, reply to blog posts, help people on Twitter, whatever it takes to spread the word. Keeping up in discussion on any design (or other industry related) blogs allows you to post a link back to your own website, which is just more inbound links.
Summary
So all in all, participating in the community and replying when you can pays off in more than just moral satisfaction, but in search ranking as well! Practicing these tips and others will definitely help your SEO, so start trying them for yourself!
This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 5:16 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
6 Responses to “Quick SEO Tips For Your Website”
Deep links within the websites/blogs pages is also very important and is usually overlooked by online webmasters and affiliate marketers.
Combine all of this with your off site SEO and your website will be a G search, magnet.
Thanks for this, I’m trying to learn SEO right now.
All this information is definitely relevant and useful for helping your website get a better ranking in the search engines. A good article, thanks for taking the time to write and share this information.
Nice article. By the way when it comes to outbound link, if we give an outbound link which has a no follow tag on it, will it then add strength to one’s article? I mean as no follow links are of no use to those to whom the back link is linking. But will it be equally beneficial as other normal link to the person who gives a back link (outbound link) in his article?
Some good points in this article! It’s nice to locate discussion genuinely worth a read. Keep up the efforts…
Great tips, thanks a lot! Regarding the title, I’d also recommend using keyword tools, like the one from Google. This way, you can make sure you’re title tag is TRULY effective for search engines. You have to know what your visitors are looking for, right?