Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic in the World Wide Web. After all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. I have identified and made a list of top 15 SEO practices that I tend to forget quite often. These simple SEO techniques if practiced properly can make a significant difference as to how my pages are ranked in the Search Engine Queries.
- Use rel=”nofollow” tag on low value links to not pass the page rank juice. For example ‘Read the rest of the entry’, ‘About’, ‘Contact’ etc
- Use proper anchor text for interlinks. Don’t use ‘here’ or ‘there’.
- Optimize the images, always create alt tags and write description in the alt tag.
- Use search engine friendly permalinks. Make sure the URLs do not have ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters.
- Use hyphens (-) between words to improve readability.
- Do not use underscores (_), use hyphens (-) instead.
- Do not use session id in URLs.
- Use sticky posts.
- Use tag clouds.
- Have a category description paragraph.
- Let the visitors subscribe to category specific RSS feed. (Use category specific RSS plugin for WordPress)
- Use internal linking when possible and appropriate.
- Use sub-directories rather than sub-domains when possible. Sub-domains do not share link love from the main domain as it is treated as a different domain.
- Research the target audience and aim the site content appropriately.
- Keep the content up to date. Visitors don’t like outdated content. Updating the content frequently also attracts the Search engines spiders to index the web pages frequently.
Going forward I will try to use this list to optimize my web pages for search engines.
Don’t forget to read the 6 SEO Strategies That Can Generate Highly Targeted Traffic and Blog Commenting Strategies to Improve Search Ranking articles.
Have you identified any SEO mistakes that you commonly make?
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