Today I was working on a site that has been around for years and hasn’t had much luck with ranking well in the search engines. The company hadn’t spent any time optimizing there site for the best chance to get decent rankings, and as a result, they were getting very little traffic from Google, MSN, or Yahoo.
This got me thinking of how often I see this and how spending a little time improving your site for SEO can bring you a lot of new traffic. Here are 5 quick tips to help make sure your site is ready for search engines.
1. Title Tags
Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are in your title tags (but not every keyword as it will decrease click through rates and search engines only show a few words) I’ve seen too many page titles with just the company name which isn’t helping. Every page should have a unique title.
2. Have Good Content
Search engines love good content just as much as visitors do. Make sure your keywords are written in your content and that it is readable to the human eye as well.
3. Make Your Internal Links Count
When linking to your pages, make sure your internal links are using descriptive words. Instead of saying “click here” to read more. Make the link be descriptive such as “Vancouver web design“, etc.
4. Keep it Updated
Always be adding new and interesting content to your website. Fresh content will help improve your search rankings.
5. Get QUALITY Links
Links from other relevant sites play a huge role in your search rankings. Be careful though as links are all about quality over quantity. You need to get links from relevant sites linking to you. The more trustworthy the site, the higher quality the link is. Don’t bother signing up for those services that offer to give you 1000+ links in a month. They don’t work and could harm you as it tends to look like spam.