Top ten seo tips

Follow these simple tips and your page will start to climb up the ranks.

· Fresh content

Google loves fresh content. They recently developed a new spider called freshbot that crawls the web looking for new and updated pages and sites. Once fresh content is discovered freshbot then list the page at the top of the Google index for that sites keywords. The site will remain top for a few days, but if the page was just an updated version of what is already in the results it will revert back to the old version and drop back to it's original position. If the page is brand new then it will drop completely from the index, until the next full update when it should take a permanent place in the results. The lesson here is simple - if you keep you're site updated daily you should be able to keep the site close to the top of the search results.

· Content

It's recommended that you have a minimum of 300 words per page. This text should be descriptive to explain what the page is about and not rely on the title of the page to do this. Place your keywords within the text but don't stuff with too many keywords so that it become illegible. This is known as keyword density.

· Title of the page

The title of any web page should be descriptive and explain the contents of the page. Accordingly, never leave the home page with the default title of Home, Index, or Default. The title of a page will give a visitor and search engine spider an idea of a page's contents.

· Domain and the URL

Naming a file using a "-" in between your keywords in your domain name will act as a space in between words. Thus, if you do a search for "car guide " a domain name of car-guide.com would rank higher than a domain name like carguide.com. The actual URL of a page can also influence the results as well, for instance:

whatwidget.com/big-widgets.html
should in theory rank higher than:
whatwidget.com/bigwidgets.html

· H1, Bold, Italics

Place your main keywords once in an Hx-tag, once in bold and then once in an italics tag. Placing keywords in these elements notifies the search engine crawler that these are important words/phrases so in turn the crawler will make the assumption that the keywords are important for a visitor.

· Anchor text

Anchor text is also know as text links. These should be descriptive keywords rather than some generic phrase such as "click here". By making anchor text more descriptive you help spiders to better understand the content of your site thereby improving the ranking.

· Checking A Previous Domain

If you buy a previously used domain name it is worth checking the history of the URL. Check to see if the domain was previously banned by a search engine and find out if it still carries any penalties. By using the wayback machine at www.archive.org you can see what the domain looked like when it first went live.

· Page submission

Submit the root page to all the big search engines on the Internet: Google, Yahoo, MSN. It will take them a while until they crawl your site fully but be patient. There are plenty of directories online, find one that fits the theme of your site and submit the root URL, again this may take a while but be patient.

· Linking

Also see http://www.e-marketing.org.uk/seo/web-links.aspx

Exchange reciprocal links with sites that are relevant to your site and where possible ensure that the site ranks well in the results pages that use the same keywords as your own. It will help a search engine to spot a theme. The same also goes for your own site, link the internal pages together if the content compliments each other.

· Tracking

Get a good web stats package that lets you know what search engine spiders are visiting your site, what keywords are being used to find your site. The referrers that direct users to your site, and of course how many hits/page views you are getting.