SEO Tip 4 - Page Linking

There are two different types of links – Internal and External. Every time you link to a page, post or other site, you are creating very useful optimisation to your website which helps increase your site ranking. If a page or post isn't important to your SEO strategy, then don’t bother linking it, but if you have to link it for user experience then use the “no follow” code so the search engines will know not to follow the link and that way all the valuable links will be followed. (A “no follow” link can be followed by a person, but not a search engine.)

An example of using the “no follow” attribute in html code:

<a href="http://websiteaddress.com" rel="nofollow">My Site</a>

Internal Links are links within your own site. For example, one post may contain a link to another post or page on the same topic. Developing internal links is a great way to show search engines the relevancy of your website, as well as assist human reader in finding valuable information. Just make sure that you are linking to related pages and not random pages as this kind of cross linking will have a negative effect on search engine robots!

2 key points to remember when internal page linking:

• Don’t link to a bunch of posts, pages, etc.. (particularly archive pages) from your sidebar.
• DO use a keyword as your link. Having a link that says “click here” does nothing for your search engine efforts.

External links are when you link from your website to another web site. Don’t link all the sites you like to your sidebar. This just gives away SEO to the other site. Use external links sparingly and strategically.

While the links back to your site from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn may not do anything for your official search engine results, they can do a lot for sharing useful information and driving traffic by bringing people to your website. Not only that, these websites link quite high on search engines so having your social media page resulting high up on search engine is as good as your website doing well on search engine results. The more useful your information, the more likely people are to pass it on to others. There’s nothing like word of mouth advertising.

SEO Tip 2 - Friendly Images

Search engine traffic from images is extremely underrated, especially when some website have more images than contents. As search engines cannot “read” images and any content on the image you need to make sure this is placed in the descriptions, tags, and titles you give your images. By doing this not only does your site looks good to the public but also works well for SEO.

All images should have ALT and TITLE attributes defined. This is the image equivalent of the doc title or Meta Description for the website page.

Image filenames should have a relevant name, ideally with a keyword in it. For example, an image filename of “web123.jpg” might make sense to you, the website owner or the website design company that created your website, but won’t mean anything to a search engine. “website-design.jpg” is a much more descriptive, and relevant, filename.

E-commerce website design tends to be orientated around having plenty of images to make the product they selling look good, but what use is a e-commerce site if you are not getting much traffic. by following the above you will be placing key phrases for each category  image, sub category image and product images, that is a lot of additional content and keywords  which will  surely help with search engine optimisation.

SEO Tip 1 - Meta Description

Most people are confused about how to use Meta Descriptions and end up using it incorrectly which.

Meta data serves very two simple purposes:

• tells search engines what your site is about
• displayed on search results, which tells people what your site is about

Meta Description doesn't actually affect your page ranking in the search engine results but it is important for what appears on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The Meta Description is what people see when searching on search engines and it helps them determine whether or not to click through to your website. As mentioned in my previous blog, high rankings are meaningless if nobody clicks on the links because the description isn't appropriate for humans or you get poor quality clicks to your website which results in high bounce rate.

A couple of key points to keep in mind when writing out your Meta Description for your website:

1. You are limited to 160 characters.
2. If you do not specify a Meta Description, the search engine will either automatically use the first 160 characters of your page or post for the description, or will examine the on-page content for what it thinks is the best description to use.
3. You want to have a naturally worded Meta Description, where it flows and easy to understand what your website page is all about.
4. Don’t over use keywords in your Meta Description.

When your website design is being done you concentrate on how good your site should look and have it eye catching as well as making sure it is rank as high as possible on search engines (SEO), but what we forget is ensuring content and meta is perfect so you get relevant clicks to your website as well as the visitor understanding the content and finding what they are looking for which creates a conversion for your website. Overlooking the meta and contents simply reduce clicks and increase bounce rate.