Firstly im not an expert in Search Engine Optimization nor do I know anything which is fact about SEO, all I can do is explain what seems to work for me to get this website high in the google rankings (SERPs).
I get a number of emails from webmasters asking me to help with SEO on their websites, and want to know how much I charge for my SEO services.
Unfortunately I don't have enough knowledge to charge for this service because I would not be able to guarantee the results, which is why im adding these SEO tips to pagerank10.co.uk to try and help you out for free, and to save me time in answering the same emails over and over again :-).
Anyway, here are my SEO tips...
Meta Tags (Description & Keywords)
Personally I don't bother with the DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS meta tags because im pretty sure search engines today don't take any notice of them, besides a good popular search engine will make its own decision on what your websites about by crawling the content of your site.
Another reason I don't use these meta tags is because my website is changing all the time, and I don't want to run the risk of being penalized for including keywords or descriptions which are no longer in my content, and im sure I would forget to keep these meta tags updated.
If you do want to use the description and keyword meta tags then make sure they are 100% relevant to that pages content.
Meta Tags (Title)
The TITLE meta tags are very important, even I include these :-). Your title should include some really good keywords which are 100% relevant to your pages content. Remember that the Title is the part in bold which appears in the search engine listings, so your title needs to make sense and not be just full of keywords, filling your title full of keywords may make your site look over optimized, cheap and spammy.
Your title meta tags should be different on each page, but relevant to that pages content.
On this page the Title tag is How to SEO your Website - Search Engine Optimization
Header Text
Your header text should be very similar to your title tags, if not the same. This may improve relevancy and get ranked higher in the search engine for those searched keywords.
It would be best for your header text to be in the header font style H1,H2.. etc. apart from it needing to look like the header to visitors, the search engine will know that this is the main topic of your page.
On this page the Header text is SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Page Filename or Foldername
Your page FILENAME is better if it includes the keywords you want the page to be found in via a search engine, this is because it gives you another way to include more keywords and the visitor will see this in the search engine listings and be more confident that its going to be about the topic they are searching for.
In the filename I seperate the keywords with a _ symbol because it makes it easier to read.
On this page the Filename is search_engine_optimization.php
Domain Name
Your DOMAIN NAME should be relevant to your overall website topic and would be better to include your main overall keywords, the people who use names such as Yahoo, Google, ebay as their domain name don't rely on SEO to get traffic so instead they use short easy (sometime made up) names so they are easy to remember and market in other ways.
Don't include too many keywords in your domain name because it will look over optimized and spammy, also people wont rememeber it in future and won't be able to be bothered to type it in if they could remember it.
If your target traffic is in the uk then use the domain extension .co.uk, if its worldwide then use .com , if the domain names are all taken and you can't think of any others then use .net, if you are very desperate then use .desperate.com.uk.cheapskate :-)
Our domain name we use is pagerank10.co.uk
Page Content
It is very very important your PAGE CONTENT is unique, never copy and paste content from another website because your page will be penalized for duplicate content, if you use product feeds for your content then you will need to pay for traffic its as simple as that.
Your page content should include your keywords which are in your title, header and filename of your page but do not over use these keywords as your page will be over optimized.
Your main keywords should be close to the top of your content and occasionally have them in bold, your content should be written for your visitors and not search engines but it is very important you slip in the odd sentance which you think someone would type in to find your page.
If you want your page to rank highly for a certain topic then do not mix different topics on the same page, this page is for the topic SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION so you will not find any info in here about 'buying insurance' as this will dilute the relevancy of the page. (yes I know there are some paid ads on here which are not relevant and I would prefer it if they were all relevant to the content, but im not rich enough yet to be picky in who is paying for advertising space)
Graphics
As you can see im not a fan of having GRAPHICS on this site, the reason is I think graphics can look untidy (unless your very good with them) and can be slow to load.
If you do really want graphics on your site then make sure each one has a descriptive filename.. don't just use filnames like DCS45673.jpg or LOGO.gif for your logo, and make sure every graphic uses the ALT tag so search engines know what the graphic is about and its a good place to get some good descriptive keywords on your page.
Internal Linking
Your INTERNAL LINKS ie. menu links, should be in your website template so each page is directly linked to each other, also your link should be the same as the filename used, e.g. this page's filename is search_engine_optimization.php and im linking to it off the side menu with the anchor text link Search Engine Optimization.
Im not expecting this page to get on page 1 of google for the keywords 'Search Engine Optimization' or 'SEO' but I would be very very happy if it did as it would make me look like an SEO genius :-)
The reason im not expecting this is because those keywords (ill not mention them again because I think im over doing it already), are high traffic keywords so a lot of webmasters are competing to get ranked high for them to try and sell their SEO skills to other webmasters.
After all there are only 10 spaces on page one of Google, so to expect such high rankings for such high traffic keywords is expecting far too much, but I am expecting to get ranked high for some other relevant keywords I may have wrote in the text above, so the final result will be the same, I will have attracted visitors looking for optimizing your website for search engines.
