Basic SEO tricks for newbies
Starting out in SEO can be difficult, you don’t know what works best and you can only learn that through experience. You need as many SEO tips and SEO tricks as you can get so you can experiment with different techniques to see what works best. Here are some of my favourite SEO techniques that work time and time again.
SORT OUT YOUR CANONICALIZATION
By either adding a 301 re-direct or a canonical tag to the page you are trying to optimize, this could give your rankings a major boost. For example, both http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.htm are indexed in the search engines. These two pages you think are exactly the same, Google sees them as two separate pages. By adding a 301 re-direct or a canonical tag to the page, it tells the search engine your preferred entry point for that page. Combining the weight of both pages into your preferred one.
KEYWORD DENSITY AND YOUR TITLE TAG
Try and focus on your main keywords you are trying to optimize for your in the title tag and then keep these keywords being repeated at a density of about 1.5%, still making it read natural. This can be the hardest part.. coming up with content that reads natural, is SEO friendly, and actually useful. Your content has also got to be unique, any duplicate content and you could be liable to be penalized by Google.
DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS
Directory link submissions usually work well for starting off in SEO. You can either pay for people to submit your site too lot’s of directories, or choose to do it yourself (I always do it myself). Instead of submitting to as many as you can, try and submit to ones with a PageRank higher than 3. Also, try mixing up your anchor text and site description as Google may see these links being more organic and natural, rather than paid for and generic. There’s nothing natural about 100 links from directories with the same anchor text and description.
OPTIMIZE YOUR PAGESPEED
Try and keep your HTML as neat and tidy as possible, remove any javascript from the page and try and contain it within one javascript file. You can do the same for CSS. If you are using a CMS, you may consider using a separate template for your home page and content pages. Just to reduce the load time for each individual page. Google announced that PageSpeed is part of it’s ranking algorithm about 6 months ago.