SEO Keyword Tips of the Week

So now you’ve built your website, you’ll have to make sure that your audience (and customers) find you? With the advent of SEO, websites need to be fitted with the proper features to make sure they are search engine-friendly. Here are some quick tips that will help you create traffic for your site.

1. Unique and Quality Content – search engines base their rankings on the content of a website. Unique and quality content tells the search engine that your site is worth visiting and will rank your higher on their searches.

2. Quality Backlinks – the next thing search engines look for is how many other sites link back to you. It also looks at the quality of the site that links back – if there’s no logical reason they link back (such as spammers who leave links on non-related message boards or blogs), the less likely you will be ranked. Also, a few links from good, high-traffic sites is better than a dozen poor links.

3. Fresh Content – search engines love dynamic content, so make sure there’s always something new on your site. If your website is fairly static, it might be worth it to add a blog, news page or forum/messageboard.

4. Keyword volume – make sure your keyword pops up in the right places within your content. There is also such a thing as overpopulating your content with keywords. Search engine spiders are more sophisticated these days – they can tell if a keyword is popping up too many times and if the appearances don’t seem natural. Using bold once or twice on your keywords is also recommended.

5. Use Flash sparingly – spiders can only crawl and read text, so although a flash-intensive website looks awesome, it may not necessarily be search engine-friendly. Same goes with using images as links – at the very least,include a text link to go with the image.

6. Site maps – aside from helping customers navigate your site, this also helps search engine spiders find all the links on your website.

7. Tite tags – These are the most important words on a webpage and spiders rank them highly. Use good, quality keywords when selecting your title.

8. Meta-tags – there’s some controversy whether these are helpful at all, but a good way to use meta tags would be to put in misspellings of your desired keywords.

Check back next week for more SEO tips!