SEO Tips for Beginners

SEO Tips for Beginners

The goal of your website is to turn visitors into customers, so your search rank is key. This document is intended to help educate you further about the different aspects of SEO. Very few web design companies do SEO and very few SEO companies implement a complete strategy when it comes to SEO. Before attempting to improve your search rank yourself OR via a SEO company, it is vital that you understand the basics.

Make sure you have an analytics program installed to tell how much web traffic you are getting. If you are a current maintenance customer, we have a product called SpringMetrics installed for you. If you prefer to see Google Analytics info, let us know and we will add that to your account. We prefer the SpringMetric product because it allows for a more readability for novicce users.

Make sure your pages have title tags and meta descriptions. A title tag is the line of text that is normally displayed at the top of the browser window – it’s also what shows as the title of the result when the page is found in search engine results. Title tags are arguably the most important SEO tags for any site and tend to carry the most weight in regards to how the search engines index your site. For most search engines, the maximum length of a title tag to be displayed is between 60-70 characters. The meta description tag is where you should list a small blurb about each page. This shows in the search engine results as the description for your page so make sure to crafting a readable, compelling and RELEVANT description using important keywords. If you are an Alt Creative maintenance customer, then we have implemented some sort of title, description, and keyword tags for you. However, if you have changes or additions, we’ll be happy to look that over and implement it for you.

Make sure to leverage your keywords in the site copy. The copy on your site needs to be readable (and compelling) to the user, but it helps to use some of your keywords in the copy as well. In addition, search engines look for content that changes often. Therefore it is a good idea to implement solutions that help facilitate this such as a Twitter feed or blog feed.

Make sure your site is listed in the Google Webmaster Tools and that you have a generated Google Sitemap. If you are an Alt Creative maintenance customer, it is likely that we have already done this for you.

Get your site linked from as many external sites as possible. This is very important. Google and other search engines place weight on how many sites link to you and more importantly how relevant those links are. It is possible with a little diligence to do this yourself.

Some ways you can get your site linked to:

• Posting your site in directories such as Manta, Industry Directories, Professional Association directories, etc.
• Social Media profiles such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc. and local profiles such as the free YellowPages ad, Google Places, etc.
• Ask clients, partners, and friends with websites for link. Exchanging links (meaning putting someone else’s link on your site in order to have them put a link on their site) is a good strategy, but does not hold as much weight with Google as a direct, non-reciprocated link does. It helps if the link contains your keywords.
• Leave intelligent comments on relevant blogs that have a high rank