1) Implement Title Tags and Meta Tags
Title Tags are an important aspect of search engine optimization as they are the way to convey your marketing skills to your target audience. The wording should flow smoothly while containing important keywords. This is where the search engines and your target audience get a feel for what your website is about. You want to stress all the viral information in this limited area of space. This is your area for free advertising, so take full advantage of this. Put information like company name, and your targeted keywords that you have chosen for this page. Every page on your site should have unique title tags and meta tags.
2) Quality Content
Your content is very useful for the search engines in determining whether or not your website is relevant to your topic. You want quality, keyword rich content. You do not want to stuff your keywords, but place them sporadically throughout you site. Keyword stuffing is a black hat technique that will get you permanently banned from the search engines. Make sure that your content flows smoothly and rolls off the tongue easily. Remember humans, not search engines, have the ultimate decision to purchase your product or service. Write your content first for your audience and then add keywords where it makes sense.
3) Acquire Quality Links
Links are a valuable tool for gaining top search engine rankings. Links (back links) are viewed as a vote from one site to another, so the more links to your site; the more popular the search engines think your site is. Higher quality links from authority websites are weighed more heavily when ranking your site. So you want to acquire links from reputable websites that are popular. You want to get links that are related to your line of work to increase rankings. Make sure all your links are related in one way or another to your website. If not then your site will be penalized in the rankings, which is the opposite of what we are trying to achieve.
4) Number of Back Links
Recently, Google began to crack down on link farm sites (sites where you buy links) by penalizing them in the search engine rankings. Avoid link farms or buying links from non authority sites as they will only do more harm than good. Remember, it is not the quantity of links you have, but the quality of those links you do have. Make sure your links appear natural, not like they have been paid for. You must have something of quality to offer others so they will link to your site and increase your search engine rankings.
5) Keyword Relevant Domain Name
Before you purchase a domain name you should look for a URL that has relevant keywords to your company. You want to ensure that your domain name has some relevancy to your website. Your sub domains should not be long and full of strange characters and symbols. This will only confuse the search engines and your human visitors. The simple domain that has your keyword specific to your page is great for the search engines and human readers.
6) Use HTML
Search engine spiders have a hard time reading coding other than HTML. To avoid any confusion for the spider have your website written in HTML not Flash. If you are a large, well known company this does not play as big a role, but if you are a small company trying to make a name for yourself ensure that your programmer is using HTML.
7) Ease of Site Navigation
You want a website that is easy to navigate through. The more confusing and broken links to your site, the less likely it is that the spider will fully crawl and index all your pages. You want to submit a sitemap for Google so it can find and index all the pages in your website. Sitemaps are a necessity for websites getting all your pages indexed and included in the search engines.
8) Fresh, new content
Search engines do not want old, outdated content on their search results, so you must make sure to add new content to your site on a consistent basis. Both humans and spiders like to see new content on your website. Make sure to update your content to make sure it is up to date and relevant. You can make simple grammatical changes to your site or add pages, anything counts as new content. If you stop adding new content to your website then your rankings will start to slip and fall way below your desired results. If you see your rankings start to slip then make sure you add new content to your site.
9) Add a Blog to Your Site
A blog is a great tool for keeping visitors up to date to with your site. Blogs help promote your site and give your visitors another way to locate your website. Blogs and your blog posts get indexed in the search engines quite quickly as well. Start a blog about the industry you are in and you can quickly build up your rankings. Blogs are especially useful for adding fresh content to your site. Blog posts are seen as new content, so post in your blog at least once a week to keep your content new. Blog postings do not have to be relevant to your website, but it does help to keep the content somewhat relevant to build up and authority blog.
10) Make Your Website for Humans Not Spiders!
This is probably one of the biggest that is done by newcomers to internet marketing. They write and organize their website for the search engines to achieve high rankings, yet the traffic that comes in does not make a purchase. You want to have a website that is easy to read and comprehend, not a site that is made for the spiders to read. Ultimately, humans who hold the purchasing power view your site. Ensure that your website is easy to read and does not have any misspellings.
