Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for all Kinds of Websites

If you surf the net long enough, you're bound to come across all kinds of websites that give you search optimization tips (SEO) for certain kinds of websites. Most of the more recent articles will talk about blogs, but other kinds of websites need SEO as well. In fact, good blogging software needs very little SEO out of the box since it's typically built in. Static websites, even those using popular content management system (CMS) software, usually need a bit more work. My SEO tips aim to cover all kinds of websites.

While I'm not a professional SEO person, I've learned over time what works and what doesn't. Some SEO is a terrible waste of time while some SEO is definitely NOT a waste of time. The tips I'm passing along have probably been mentioned in one place or another already or I may have mentioned some of them myself in past articles. Regardless, these tips are important enough that everyone should know about them. As I wrote this article, I pulled the tips from some of my past articles and I'll be redirecting those old articles to this one as an aggregated tips article sometime today.

The Page Title

Each page of every website actually has two page titles. One is the title displayed and one is the HTML title. The displayed title should be contained within a heading tag like <h1></h1> (some people use h1 for other things, like the website title, but any heading tag will do as long as you set heading tag priorities). The HTML title must be enclosed within the title tag, which itself is enclosed with the head tag for the page.

Popular blog and CMS software packages will usually take care of this for you through the themes provided. If not, it's not that hard to do it yourself. Since I use WordPress for my blogs, I use a plugin that can make my HTML title different than the displayed title. This isn't an issue if you write good page titles (titles containing relevant keywords) for display. If you don't, you want to make sure the keywords are in your HTML title.

By default, WordPress adds the website title to the page title to form the HTML title. On some of my blogs (I have several), this is preferred because the website titles have my main keywords in them. On others, like this one, I don't want the website title tacked onto every page. If the plugin doesn't rewrite the HTML title completely (mine doesn't) then that part of the theme file has to be edited by hand.

The important thing to note about page titles is that they should contain, at a minimum, the main relevant keywords for that page. This goes for both the displayed title and the HTML title.

Content Comes First

This has a dual meaning. I'll start with the first meaning:

As anyone with any experience knows, content is king when it comes to the web. That's what the search engines are looking for and that's what your visitors are looking for. Great content will always beat out good content and good content will always beat out mediocre content. We can't all create great content all of the time, but it's what we should be striving for.

Great content doesn't ramble about different topics, all on the same page. It's focused on specific keywords. If you write an article that doesn't stay on topic, you need to read it and rewrite it as many times as necessary to make it that way. I don't care if your website is personal in nature. You need to stick to the main topic and any sub-topics you're covering. If you're talking about dogs as pets, for example, you can't start talking about cars without keeping it in context. I mean, you could be talking about pet dogs chasing cars and it would be in context with the other keywords.

If you practice writing content like this, the search engines will like it as much as your human visitors will.

The second meaning: The content needs to be higher in the page than anything else, even while the page is loading for the visitor. It doesn't matter where your sidebar is (or sidebars are), the main content needs to show up first. The search engines will devour it before ignoring most of the navigational headings and links.

If you're using a theme for WordPress, for example, that doesn't load the content portion of the page first, then you need to find a different theme or create one of your own. My current theme does this naturally because the sidebar is on the right side. What if your sidebar is on the left or you have one sidebar on each side (the 3-column holy grail layout)? You can control all of this using cascading style sheets (CSS).

Keywords

Single keywords and keyword phrases are both called keywords by most people. When you're writing that great content that you're supposed to be writing, you need to stay focused on related keywords. Multiple keywords can share the same root words. I'll use the word bike as an example. It's a root word. Related keywords which use it as a root word can include biking, bicycle, bicycling, motorbike, motorcycle and even motorcycling.

It's all about context. The search engines continue to get smarter (in an algorithmic kind of way) and are learning to detect context almost as well as your human visitors. This is what is meant by related and relevant keywords.

These keywords (up to 10 of the most relevant) should be included within your HTML meta keywords tag and your HTML meta description tag should include a good description of the content, up to about 150 characters. The first 150 characters of your page content will work if it accurately presents the content. That's how I usually do it and I use a WordPress plugin (the same SEO plugin I use for the HTML title) to do it.

Contrary to popular belief, the meta keywords and the meta description are tags used by certain search engines. Even Google will use the meta description if it can't find a relevant snippet of content that matches the search item requested (but usually only until the page is indexed completely).

One URL for Your Page

There should always be only one URL pointing to your page. You will be surprised to find, if you look around enough, to find URLs like this that all point to the same page:

• http://domain.com/my-page
• http://domain.com/my-page/
• http://www.domain.com/my page
• http://www.domain.com/my-page/

Those don't even include the extra parameters tacked on by other websites, like "?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed" as one example. While you can't control what other sites tack on, you can control your part if your web server has that capability. I'll expound on that in a future article covering the Apache .htaccess file, the nginx configuration file and the PHP scripting language.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links on other websites which point to your website. They either point to your main or home page or they point to a specific page. It's hard to get good backlinks nowadays, but they can still be obtained. The best way is to obtain them naturally, by writing great content that people want to link to.

Another way to get backlinks, both good and not so good, is to comment on websites that have commenting capabilities. It doesn't matter if they're "dofollow" or carry the nofollow attribute. If you do it often enough, you'll get a good mix of both. Although you may have been taught that your link needs to have good anchor text, all backlinks count – even those that use your name as the anchor text.

The best backlinks come from links added to that great content that everyone should be writing. They're editorial links and carry much more weight than any other kind. Comment links, even if followed by the search engines, carry far less weight. Some carry no weight, but will still be useful in attracting human visitors.

Getting links on social networking sites is useful for human visitors too, if those links are viewable by the public. If they sit behind a log in, they're probably worthless for anything but specific human visitors. Forums are usually visible to the public even when you can't post to them without logging in. There's nothing wrong with adding a link to the signature area of your forum posts. It all depends on the forum rules as to how many and what kind of links you can use.

Link directory backlinks are still useful, despite people saying otherwise. I use a service to submit this blog to hundreds of link directories. It's called "Directory Maximizer". There are other services like it; it just happens to be the one I use. The proof is in the pudding, as the saying goes. My daily visitor count fluctuated between 900 and 1100 each day depending on the day of the week, holidays, and other factors before I started using the service. Since I started using the service, even while blocking more and more human spam sources along with bad bots, that count has risen continuously. My visitor count rarely drops below 1000, even on holiday weekends. How does 1200 plus in just a couple of months sound to you? Not only that, but Google now includes more pages in its index than before I started using the service.

My writing hasn't improved any, and the subject matter isn't any more popular than before, so what else would YOU attribute more traffic to? Getting a lot of backlinks to your website will always help you, regardless of what kind of website they come from.

On another note, you should have a way of tracking 404 errors generated by your website. The 404 errors could be pages you removed or simply malformed backlinks coming from other websites or search engines. If you have the server capability, you should always redirect those broken links to either a relevant active page, your home page, or let them land on a good 404 page. That's another subject I'll expound on in a future article.

Interim Summary

This article turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated and I haven't even touched on things like internal linking structures. I don't want to bore you with too much too fast, so I'll end it here and promise a follow-up article, titled "More Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for all Kinds of Websites". There really is a lot more to cover.

If I can prevent boring myself, I'll see if I can write it tomorrow.

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