A Few Simple Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips
by Scot Ranney
Your search engine rankings grow when you do things to your web site that search engines like. Content that contains your key words and phrases, reciprocal links and articles, putting the right information in the names of your pages and HTML elements, and more. Here are a handful of simple SEO tips that will help your site in the search engines.
DMOZ.org
The DMOZ Open Directory Project is a good place to put your site if it's not already there. All of the major search engines seem to crawl through DMOZ and it doesn't take long before you can find your site on Google and others.
Content Counts
Search engines like finding search terms in the content of your pages. You will get better search results if your pages contain search terms and phrases for your website. It sounds obvious, but it's easy to forget when you're writing web pages.
Trading Links & Articles
How popular are you? How many other sites are linking to your site or posting your article threads? Contact the websites you want to trade links and/or articles with and offer to put their site in your links page if they will do the same for you. Do one of these a day and this alone will help your search engine rankings.
Naming Links and Images
Name your links and images whenever you have the chance and also make sure your links have alt tags (alternate text). If your location is relevant, include your city and state in your link and image titles.
Search Engines Like New Stuff
Add new relavent content to your site as often as possible. Blogging and having forums is a great way to do that, plus they create new content on their own as people respond. The best way to do this is through blogging and writing something that people will respond to. If the discussion is relevant to your search terms, your ranking will improve.
Things To Read About
Take a look at Search Engine Robots some time if you are wondering how to communicate with the search engines as they spider (follow links and pages) your site.
Site Maps are files that contain your website layout, or map. Search engines can look at these sitemaps to make sure nothing is missed. Here is Google's Sitemap. Here is Google's Sitemap Maker.
When you reply to a forum or blog post, make sure you put your website in your signature. Search engines even pick up on these.
Social networking works. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other services to spread you around the web even more.
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