Whether you are a SEO beginner or you would just like to try SEO on your own rather than employing a costly SEO firm, there are a few things you could implement to improve your website for the SE from the start. And I am going to list those below:

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Many SEO gurus will tell you to go for the long-tail technique. I am not going to recommend special keyword selection tools, although there are plenty very useful on the Web. I am just going to tell you: what would you type into the search box to find products similar to yours? There! That’s your answer! So I suggest that you go for the keyword phrases that are the most relevant for your potential clients.

A special note: I am talking about serious business and e-commerce websites and not about made for AdSense websites. If this is your case, sorry… this article is not for you, as it promotes ethical SEO tactics.

It is really simple to determine the most relevant keywords: what do you sell? Clothes. What kind of clothes? Women’s clothes. You probably split your site in categories. Then choose for each page two-three relevant keywords and optimize your pages for them. Don’t stuff them illogically in your text. Write naturally, write for the visitors. They should now be aware that you’ve been using keywords to boost your ranks. The search engines don’t like to be manipulated either. So better don’t try it. The key is to place your keywords as they come logically in the meta title, description, page title and content. And keep the keyword density around 3%.

In my previous article How to Measure SEO Success I’ve already stated that the rankings are not important. What matters is what the surfers do on your website: how much time do they spend on your site? What are the most visited pages? What are the exist pages? Think about it! Being number one for “clothes” might bring you a big smile on your face, but is it going to bring the traffic you need? Well, you don’t sell clothes in general. You sell clothes for women. And that’s what you should be focusing on. But enough about keywords!

Meta Tags

Some say they don’t matter. I say they do. Why? Would you read a book without a title? OK. You’d probably read it if you accidentally discover its content. So the meta title does matter. It’s what appears first in the search engine listings. How long should this tag be? I’d say 60 characters, including spaces.

The meta description matters too! It’s basically a short summary of the website. Sometimes this is the second element that appears in the SE results, unless the search engines captures a phrase from the content that contains a specific keyword. As you see above, the description states clearly what the users might find on the page. This is a very good SEO technique: it’s user oriented and this is what search engines really want from a website. Up to 200 characters.

The meta keywords are no longer important for listings in the major search engines. But it doesn’t hurt to have the tag. Let it there for less important search engines. Some still use it to index sites in certain categories. Some directories take this tag into consideration too. Try to keep the number of keywords low. Insert solely keywords that appear in the content of your page. Useless to say: the title and description should be relevant and related to the content.

Page Layout

The search engine spiders read the code of a page from left to right, top to bottom. The higher you place the content to the top, the better. Ideal would be to have the link menu on the right side, but, as Web users expect it generally on the left, there’s not much you can do here. What you could do is avoid using frames and images instead of text. CSS provides for a clean code, with no tables and plenty other advantages.

Content

For this refer to my article Make Your Content Rule the Web and How to Write Blogs and Web Content.

More… tomorrow…