tips for effective SEO:
Tracking
Before you start your SEO campaign make sure to implement a quality web stats package that lets you know what search engine spiders are visiting your site, what keywords are referring the most traffic to your site, and how many hits/page views you are getting.
Build great design
To get the best search engine visibility web designers should follow the 5 basis rules if web design which states that web site should be:
Easy to read
Easy to navigate
Easy to find
Consistent in design and layout
Quick to download
Write effective Title tag on the page
Arguably the most important ranking factor for effective natural SEO is the title denoted by the – title – tags on HTML. This title is considered primary text by the search engines meaning that all the search engines record this text and place considerable value on it. It is important because it is the first text shown in the search results as a hyperlink to your site. As a general rule a descriptive title should be 5 to 10 words for each page or 69 to 75 characters.
Body text
On your page you should always aim to have a healthy amount of descriptive body text to explain what the page is about, don’t rely on the title of the page. You should aim to have your keyword in the text as much as you can, with it still being comfortable to read. This is known as keyword density. All search engines consider words at the top of the page, above the fold as more important in value than the rest of the page
Domain and the URL
Placing key-words in the domain can have some weighting in the effectiveness of your natural SEO. The reasoning is that the terms or phrases matching the words you typed in a query are highlighted when you view the search results. This is known as search- term highlighting or term highlighting. Note; If you are going to buy and use a URL that may have already been used in the past, it is worth while checking the history of the URL.
H1, Bold, Italics
You should have your main keywords once in an H1 tag, once in bold and then once in ITALICS, this should show the search engine crawler that these are important words/phrases for the page, so in turn the crawler will make the assumption that the keywords are important for a visitor.
Anchor text
Anchor text is what we call text links. You should always try and have all text links as descriptive keywords. When a spider follows the link to your page it should have an understanding of the content. Anchor text is a great way of improving your rankings on competitive keywords.
Write fresh content
Google loves fresh content. They have a fairly new spider called freshbot, it crawls the web daily looking for new/updated pages and sites. It will then list the page at the top of their index for that sites keywords. It will stay there for a few days, if the page was just an updated version of what is already in the results it will revert back to the old version and drop back to it’s old position, if the page is brand new then it will drop completely from the index, until the next full update when it should take a permanent place in the results.
Linking
Build high quality external links to your website. Sites with high quality credible links pointing into them gain more popularity than sites with low quality links. It is rumoured that Googles places up to 60% of its weighting on quality of party external links:
See: www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/linkbuilding
Page submission
Submit the root page to all the major UK search engines on the Internet: Google, Yahoo, MSN. It will take them a while until they crawl your site fully but be patient. There are plenty of directories online, find one that fits the theme of your site and submit the root URL, again this may take a while but be patient.