Rank well in the search engines
If you have a web site or a blog you want people to visit it. There is many ways to get visitors. Here I will give some tips on how you can rank good in the search engines. Search engines are powerful tools to gain traffic to your site but how can you make your site rank so it shows up at the first page when someone search for a related term? You need to think of a few things when you make your site. This is called SEO and stands for search engine optimisation.
Keywords
Think of what kind of keywords people search for when they want to come to a page like yours. Make sure that keyword is in the text of the page. Do not put more words only to rank better! It will not help and it can be negative for your ranking because it looks like spam. Do not try to rank good on many words at one page. It is better to spread it over many pages instead.
The title-tag
Have a unique title tag on each page. Make sure your keywords are represented. Try to keep your title short and not more than 60 characters.
The meta description tag
It has not much to do with your ranking but it is often this that shows up in the search engine result under the title. Make sure each page have a unique description tag. If you not want to have it unique you better not use it. Make it describing and attractive.
The header tags
Use one h1-tag on each page and make sure it contains the main keywords of the page. Sub-headings h2, h3 is used in the same way but remember that h3 is a sub-header to h2 and not the third header. Many think that h1 is very big and take a lot of space. It's true but use CSS to change the size to fit your page.
Links and link structure
Links are very important for your ranking. Having a lot of links pointing to your site is very important because it will show that your site is important. The search engines look more and more on if the links are relevant for the content. So a page about cars linking to a page about trees will not make the same affect as if a page about forests links to the page about trees. Pages that rank higher will of course have a bigger impact on the page they link to. There is two kind of links. One is internal links that is links to pages on the same domain. Out links is the other kind and that is links that point to pages on other domains. Internal links have a bigger value than links from outside. It's important to make sure that you have a good link structure on the site. All pages shall have links to the start page and all pages shall have links pointing to it. Links from outside is also very important so work regular with getting links. Directories are an easy way to get in links and there is very many of them so you might only chose the better ones. Make sure your don't get too many in links too fast. It can look suspect and you might rank lower for some time. The anchor text should contain the keywords that you want to rank on. That apply to all kind of links.
SEO-friendly URL
the URL of a page can have a big effect on the ranking. Make sure your keywords is represented and use "-" between the words. Try to avoid dynamic-URL. It's often done through mod rewrite on apache servers. It let you change the URL to be very nice. If your keywords are "Internet marketing" you could give the URL: internet-marketing.htm. You could if you want remove ".htm". Good URL will also help you when people are linking to your page. Often in forums there is only to copy and paste the URL to the forum and it become a link. In that case you will get your keywords in the anchor text and that is to prefer. Also a good domain name with your keywords in it will have good effect.
Image search ranking
Images can give some traffic from the image search engines. Often it is not quality visitors because they often leave very soon so you could ignore this if you feel so. Important is to describe the image in the filename. Example: Bird-in-tree.png, man-with-dog.jpg and java-ebook.png. You can also use the alt and title attribute on the images. The alt attribute is will show instead of the image if the image could not load. That could be worth thinking. Otherwise you could but some keywords in there but you better build a whole sentence. Text around the image is also very important for the image rank. You could have describing words under the image. That will also help your visitors.
Don't forget your visitors!
You should always keep your visitors in mind. It's them you do the page to, not the search engines. If your visitors like your site they will tell their friends and link to your page. At a good page the webmaster don't need to hunt links. They will come naturally.
Duplicate content
All pages should have unique content. It's very important. Common mistakes is that the root and index.html shows the same. If you are using dynamic URL there is also big risk for duplicate content. Rewrite the URL or redirect so there is only one page that show the same content. Otherwise you will spread your ranking to more than one page but only one page will be showed by the search engines. Do not use the your site with both www and without. This look like two different sites with the same content. Not good! You should chose one and 301 redirect to the other. This problem will also be between different domains. So you have to keep your content unique and stop people who want to steal it.
Avoid black hat!
Black hat is a term that means strategies to manipulate the search engines in an unfair way. Cloaking is when you show another content to the search engines than the visitors. It could be hiding text behind an image, invisible text or something else. Do not use cloaking! It will only result in that your site is banned.
You can beat the SEO companies!
Of course there is a lot more things to say about SEO. This could be the start of something. There is a lot of SEO companies that you could pay for doing this but that's not worth it. With these SEO tips you can do it yourself. Join SEO forums and discuss and you will learn a lot.