12 Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks

In the field of search engine optimization, there are several things that need to be paid attention to. Not just things to focus on doing, but also things to be careful to avoid doing. Here are some search engine optimization tips and tricks for you to follow:

-- Search Engine Optimization: 6 Things You Should Do --

1) Do keyword research. Determine what topics your site is covering primarily. Find strong keywords that encompass these topics. Find good strong, long-tailed keywords if possible. Also, find out what kind of traffic these keywords produce, and how many people (if any) are paying for these keywords through paid advertising.

2) Check your competition. SEO is all about beating your competition. Find out who's ranking for your targeted keywords to see how difficult it may be to overtake them. It's good to pick apart the first ten results in the listings for your keyword search. Look at their tags, the keyword density in their content, and other details. To overtake them, imitate (without copying), and improve upon their methods, if possible.

3) Use primary SEO tags and content with your keywords. The main things you should focus on are the title tags, H1 tags, keywords within the URL, and keyword density in your content (3-6% at the most). It will help immensely to avoid auto-generated URL names, and manually name URLs to concise labels containing your keywords. Also make sure that your description meta tag is one that will entice people to visit the page.

4) Keep keyword themes. Maintain unique keyword themes for each page. It's better to focus individual pages for specific keyword phrases, as opposed to trying to optimize any page for every keyword in your list of keywords. The tighter you can keep a page theme, the easier it will be to increase your page rankings on the search engines.

5) Get quality, relevant backlinks. A few links from relevant high PR pages will often have much greater effect than several links from low PR, non-relevant pages. Search engines will look for authority sites by seeing what relevant pages are linking to them. Keep your anchor text varied, but still retaining your keyword theme for your backlinks.

6) Use a sitemap. Having a sitemap in XML format will help the search engines find all pages within your site more quickly. To ensure your pages are all crawled regularly, automate the updating of your XML sitemap, if possible. A healthy site will see many changes regularly; keeping an updated sitemap will help the search engines be aware of all new updates to your site in a real-time basis.

-- Search Engine Optimization: 6 Things You Should NOT Do --

1) Rely on the 'keywords? meta tag. The keywords meta tag is often relied upon by many people for what they believe is the primary element of search engine optimization. The truth is that this tag is only looked at by Yahoo and Ask.com, and even by them this is seen as additional content. There are no bonus 'points? for keywords in this tag. Google completely ignores this meta tag.

2) Try to target overly broad keywords. By targeting broad keywords, you're both going to find much tougher competition as well as not have tightly niched keywords to find specific visitors. More targeted keywords will help pinpoint web visitors looking for specific information. And a bonus will be that it's often much easier to rank for more targeted keywords.

3) Use major SEO elements in a template. If you put some of the major SEO elements into a template, this removes the uniqueness from several pages. This will kill any chance for ranking for your keywords. Make sure to keep things such as the title and description tags unique on every page.

4) Keyword stuffing. Trying to trick the search engines into thinking your page contains more information about certain keywords than it truly does will only risk ranking demotion or even blacklisting. Trying to hide keywords by making them invisible will often be found as a black hat technique by the search engines. Techniques like this will have severe consequences.

5) Reciprocal linking. This used to work very well in the past, but with many of the changes in the search engine algorithms, they've begun to give far less value to reciprocal links. One-way linking is far more effective. Reciprocal linking should not be pursued heavily for serious SEO endeavors.

6) Use link-farms. Trying to get several backlinks by posting a link to your site on one of these pages will not add great value. These sites do not offer any quality content and because of this are seen by the search engines as black-hat sites. Being linked to from one of these sites will not hurt you but it will not help much - linking TO them will risk serious punishment. Avoid this at all costs, and try to find relevant sites to link to with quality content.

Hopefully these 12 search engine optimization tips and tricks will help you with your SEO endeavors, and you can raise your site in the SERPs further by using these techniques.

Eric G. works for Tulsa Marketing Online. Eric does search engine optimization in addition to other internet marketing methods for businesses trying to increase their profits online.