14 Tips to Increase Search Engine Visibility with SEO

All Webmasters and website owners have a dream to be at the top of Google's search pages. To reach that dream, you need to play the SEO game.

Now, first of all, I'm not saying that I'm an SEO expert as such.

Over the past few years of me working in Web Design and Development, I have come across the term "SEO" quite a few times. For those of you who don't know what it means, SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and it is basically the art of getting search engines such as Google and Yahoo to notice your website and decide on how high they should put you in relevant search results.

SEO experts will tell you that there are various things that sometimes makes SEO sound hard to do but truthfully, it's not that hard. All you need to do is know the rules of the game, what moves you can and should make and be persistant with it because it can take time for you to get noticed, especially if your website is in a highly competitive keyword market.

Ok, so here are some of my key points that I'd like to share with you:

1. Keyword your domain name

Some of you may not realise this but SEO should start from the time you choose your domain name. The name that you choose should ideally be a .com domain name containing your keywords. It should ideally be short, easy to spell and most importantly easy to remember. Try to avoid complicated, hard to spell words, hypens (-) and other unusual characters.


2. Get quality inbound and outbound links

Search engines (i.e. Google) rank websites according to the number of "quality" inbound links they have. Inbound links are basically links that point into a website from other websites. You should spend time in getting "authoritive sites" to link back to yours or sites that have a high PageRank. Authorative sites are websites that specialise in a particular category and if it is recognised as an authorative site then it would almost certainly have a high PageRank. One inbound link from a site with a high PageRank is worth more than having 5 inbound links from website that have a low PageRank.


3. Increase your PageRank

To play the Google SEO game, you should try to Increase your PageRank. A PageRank is basically a numerical weighting that is used to measure the relevance of a website/page for particular keywords. A high PageRank can help push you up a search result listing for your particular keyword(s). Authorative sites usually have high PageRanks. You can increase your PageRanks by getting many quality inbound links to your site. You can check your website's PageRank in many websites such as this website or by installing Google's Toolbar.


4. Put your keywords in your URLs

This tip is similar to the first (Keyword your domain name). When you build the directory structure of your website and format your URLs, make sure to include your keywords in the sub-folder and page/file names.
So, for example, if you were to write a post about the iPhone and how to unlock your iPhone then you could format your URL to something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/how-to-unlock-your-iphone.html or
http://www.yoursite.com/iphone/how-to-unlock-your-iphone.html.
Notice the sub-directory also has a keyword "/iphone/" in it. Also one last thing to note in this tip is that, instead of scramming your words together (e.g. howtounlockyouriphone), you should space out your words in your URL using hypens (-). Apparently, Google likes it more than underscores (_).


5. Your Page title, page description and heading should always contain your relevant keywords

Carrying on from the last point on having relevant keywords in your URL, you should also have those relevant keywords in your webpage as well. To be more specific, they should be placed in your page Title, page Description and your page Heading. This tip is the very basic step that you should all do if you do not want your website/page to be buried on the 100th page in a search result. It is also a good idea to try to have your relevant keywords in the first few lines in your main content.


6. Use Heading tags

Heading tags (H1, H2,... H6) are used to emphasis a heading or section in a webpage. It is also a very good place to put your keywords too because Google's GoogleBot (or other search enginess "robot", "spider" or "crawlers" as they are known) recognises that text within heading tags are more important than other text and hence will place a higher weighting to whatever keywords that are in between those tags.


7.  Use your keywords in anchor text when linking

Anchor text are the text that are used to link to another page/website and can give the reader and search engine a description of what is on the destination page. Use relevant keywords in your anchor text since they are weighted highly in search engine algorithms.


8. Start Blogging

Start a blog! Blogs are a source of relevant information and if used properly can even influence consumer buying. Google loves blogs because of their freshly updated content. You may have noticed that when doing a search, there would have been a high probability that you may have found your information in a blog. There are many blog sites around such as blogger and they are easy to set up. When you write a blog, you can write about absolutely anything. You can even write about your website! Not only that, you can also create inbound links containing relevant keywords that link into your site.


9. Participate in forums

Another great way to increase your site's visibility and traffic is to participate in forums. When you do, you should put a link to your website in your signature. You can then give your own views or knowledge in forums that are in your field.


10. Have a Sitemap

Search Engines periodically crawl your website for new pages to index but sometimes there may be some pages that are not discoverable. To help Google and other search engines in their crawling and indexing process, create and submit a sitemap of your site to all the search engines. A sitemap is basically a list of pages of a website. It will help you notify search engines of pages that are avaliable for crawling and indexed.


11. Publish quality content

You should write and publish quality content on your website regularly. But publishing new content regularly, it shows search engines that your site is active and regularly being updated. This also increases the amount of content on your site, which provides more indexable pages, which increases the sites visbility and hence increases the number of quality searchable pages.


12. Submit Articles around the web

If possible, write articles related to your field and submit them to various article websites. When writing these articles you shouldn't forget to have a reference that links back to your website.


13. Use Google's Webmaster Tools

Google's Webmaster Tools provide data on what sites are linked to yours, what search queries lists out your site, which of your site's pages are indexed, which pages are not reachable and more. Use these data to help utilize the use of your website and keep track of it's activities.


14. Install Web Analytics software

To be able to improve your website, you first need to understand how it is performing, it's traffic patterns and visitor behaviour. To be able to get this data, you need to install an analytics software in your website such as Google's Analytics.