When building a Web page, there are many things to take into consideration. Your product or service needs to be easily visible and understandable, for example. However, if readers can’t find your page, then all your hard work is for naught. Because of this, SEO is a critical part of the process. Luckily, there are several SEO strategies you can implement on your own, even if you’re a beginner.
1. Understand Links
Links are an important part of the SEO process. Any time that your website is connected to another page, you get a higher ranking with search engines. This doesn’t, however, mean that you should randomly dump links across the Web. Search engines are more sophisticated than ever, so the quality of your links and the partners you use are crucial to success. The sites you link to need to be relevant to your own content and be of high quality. One of the best ways to generate good links is to network with like-minded websites and companies. Blogs and blogging networks also provide excellent linking opportunities.
2. Keywords
Keywords are often considered the foundation of a good SEO marketing strategy. Even experts make heavy use of keywords to increase visibility and build a website’s ranking. Keywords aren’t hard to understand, but you do need to be savvy to properly implement them. Search engines such as Google provide free tools to help you determine the best keywords for your industry. In most cases, these will be short phrases. Each keyword should be worked naturally into your Web content, at a ratio of about 1-2 percent; under no circumstances should a piece of content be comprised of more than 15 percent keywords.
3. Design
It can be very fulfilling to spend the time to design a visually appealing website. While your readers may appreciate bells and whistles, advanced graphics can actually interfere with a search engine’s ability to crawl your site and rank it appropriately. Keep your website design simple and text-based.
4. Tag It
Websites are almost always more than what meets the eye. They include images and HTML code. Never miss an opportunity to work your keywords into your content. All images should be tagged with appropriate, high-ranking keywords, for example. You can also make use of tagging in your page names, titles and other hidden content.
5. Relevant Content
SEO strategies used to be fairly simple. Search engines, however, are becoming more sophisticated and can easily pick out sites that feature poor content that is obviously geared to primitive SEO strategies. These sites are being rated poorly and losing ground in the ranking system. It is crucial when doing DIY SEO that you have content that is created by a real writer and is readable by real clients. It also should be completely original for best results.