If you operate a website, particularly a blog, then you cannot run away from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) any longer – unless of course you don’t want to be on the receiving end of Big G’s grace. In case it hasn’t been made abundantly clear to you just yet, most websites now get their traffic from search engines by a large percentage. Direct traffic is great but when majority of your traffic comes from search engines, the SEO becomes a must.
Most of us get pretty intimidated with all the “techniques” out there and really end up doing nothing about it. Yes, there are a ton of things one could do to make their SEO grade 10. But, we all have to start from somewhere and that is what this article is about. In fact, if you follow these 4 SEO techniques in every aspect of your website, then you should see a remarkable difference in your search engine traffic without having to do all the heavy lifting, which I will discuss later in another article.
So here are my top 4 SEO techniques that every webmaster should follow:
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Title and Slug attributes
- Every page, or every post (if blogging) must have a title. How you word your title makes a difference but what’s more important is its keyword selection. The best kind of title is one with a certain number of actions implied. For example, create a title with “5 ways” or “17 things to do to…”. These kinds of titles get a lot more clicks – per se – because you are creating an intriguing claim of some sort. With more clicks Google or other search engines start to realize that this might be an important piece of content and begin to take it a little bit higher in the results. Also, if you have an intriguing title, other webmasters will click on it and eventually might end up linking back to that page. That creates a natural order of backlinking that can push your content further up.
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Meta data
- What goes in the meta data part of your page is also extremely important. Yes, it is true that just placing a bunch of keywords in the meta data section isn’t going to get you ranked high but what it does do is that it makes search engines better understand what your page is about. A proper meta description, set of keywords and canonical clarity can make your page appear much more understandable and professional to search engines.
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Keyword density
- Keyword density refers to the ratio of the most important keyword on a page to the rest of the content on that page. Let’s say you want to write a page about Search Engine Optimization. If you happen to mention that keyword just once or twice in a 500 word article, then chances are that search engines aren’t going to rank that page high for SEO. What you need to do is to make sure that there is a proper balance between your keywords and the rest of your content. I am not in any way suggesting that you should use your keyword(s) every other word. In fact, from what I understand you can get penalized for that by search engines because they assume that you are trying to rig the results artificially. Again, moderation is key here but if you are not using your keyword in the right ration then your content will most likely no receive the attention that it deserves.
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Image attributes
- Image attributes are also extremely important. Search engines do not understand images naturally. That means that no matter how pretty an image, they have no idea search engines will treated as an object without meaning. Unless, you give your images proper attributes. That includes giving your images a title tag that is descriptive.
Again, this is in no way an exhaustive list of SEO techniques one could use. In this section of Zufzy, I will be discussion a lot more SEO and internet marketing techniques so be sure you stay tuned.
