5 basic seo tips to get a better search engine ranking

SEO Tips

Here are 5 fundamental seo tips to getting great search engine rankings.

1. Keyword Research

One of the first things you need to do for your website or selected web page is select the keywords you are going to target or optimize your page for. You shouldn't really select more than 1 or 2 keyword phrases for any of your webpages.

In order to find the most suitable and valuable keywords for your website i would advise using this Keyword Suggestion tool. What this tool does is let you enter a search term you think you want to target and it finds related keywords based on that keyword. You may find that another keyword is actually getting more website traffic than the keyword you throught you should use. After reviewing the suggestions it also shows a rough estimate of the traffic coming for that search term through the different search engines.

2. Optimizing your title tag.

This is pretty simple, but very vital. If you want to rank for a keyword phrase / phrases it needs to be in the title tag of your post / page. The title of your web page is the content between <title> and </title> in your pages. Keyword terms are given priority depending on positioning of that keyword within your titles and headings. So if you know that 'blue widgets' gets 100 searches a day and that 'green widgets' gets only 50 searches a day, your title tag (if you are targeting these terms) should probably have blue widgets mentioned first and green widgets afterwards.

This is the same with Hubpages, the title of your post should include your keywords. Why? Because what you type in becomes both the title of the page, when it is viewed by your fellow hubbers and it becomes the Heading (discussed below in more detail) of your page which is also looked at by the search engines for relevant keywords to your content.

Learn from my mistakes!! Over the years i have made many mistakes and they have cost me many visitors, learn from my mistakes rather than recreating them your self. :-)

3. Optimize your Meta Description tags

This is another important element viewed upon by the search engines, probably not as important as your Title tag but it adds towards the professioanlism of your website. The description that you see in the google results is the description most people insert between their description tags.

This code should go into the head section of your web pages. Your meta description tags should again mention the keywords you wish to target in your web page, obviously in a logical manner without spamming. Mention it a couple of times max. Think of this as a report. Your content should be outlined in brief by your title, introduction, and then extensively in body content. SEO works the same.

4. Optimizing your headings.

Just like the title tag, your headings <h1> .... <h6> tags should mention your keywords and or phrases. <h1> tags are normally looked at by the search engines as your main headings. Headings therafter <h2> .... <h6> are considered subheadings but are still important for SEO. Your most important keywords should be within those <h1> tags, so that the search engines know exactly what your content is about and so that it compliments the body content reassuring search engines that you content is exactly what it thinkgs it is

5. Content Optimization

Search engines love to find new and fresh content on your website. If you can provide decent quality and fresh content then they will love you and spider your website more often. A few sentences, completely off topic to what your website suggests through your title and Meta description will not get you first page rankings and probably wont even get you second page rankings, they must compliment eachother. Make sure that your content mentions your keywords and phrases a few times in your opening paragraph. Don't over do it or it may look like spam. Google are a lot smarter these days, so watch out!

Again i have learnt this the hard way, so learn from my mistakes.

More important than anything else in SEO is having a good keyword rich title, meta description, headings and quality content (lots of it)

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