SEO Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization

Since the ranking of a site in the search engines is largely responsible for the amount of organic traffic a blog or content receives, optimizing any site to increase its search engines exposure is an important aspect of any online marketing
effort.

Search engine optimization, or "SEO" is the method of applying technical and non technical techniques to a site to insure that the site appears on the list of search engine results when someone is looking for something that is featured on your site.

After getting some great tips from a few site managers I know and doing additional research online I was able to improve the SEO for my site. I was able to distill these tips into some basics that are important to any site that wants a larger share of search engine traffic.

Sites that are new and are just starting up should focus on getting incoming links. This is part of what Google uses to rank sites in the listings. Basically, more inbound links means more authority.

Remember that you shouldn't go overboard with SEO motivated site changes. If you start creating dummy pages with incoming links with the idea of boosting your sites exposure for a certain keyword, you will end up with a lower page rank once Google realizes what you're doing.

With these simple caveats in mind, here are a few SEO tips
to consider.

Make sure you link out in addition to getting inbound links. Google does use the number of inbound links to your sites' pages, but it does give more weight if the links are coming from authority sites.

Be sure to put keywords at the front of title tags and headlines. When you are planning the SEO for your site, think about the keywords that are most important and think about the keywords that will be used by people searching in Google for what's on your site.

Search engines seem to put more value on a keyword that used earlier in the page title. One drawback of using keyword filled headlines is that you aren't able to be nearly as creative as those tabloid newspapers can be.

Web addresses for any articles or blog posts should include keywords. It is also important that the URL for each article contains the keywords used in your headline and even the category for the article.

Page descriptions should be removed if they are not unique. If you use the first sentence of the article on the page or simply use the same meta-description on each page, it's not going to be as relevant as the description that Google can extract from your site. Therefore, if your description is identical on every page you are much better of removing it and letting Google generate it on its own.

Highlight your top content on every page. One feature that is common on major news sites is a list of "Most Popular Stories" or "Most Emailed Stories." Having that list in a prominent place on your site, on all pages, would bring more traffic (and inbound links) to your site's best content, and serve as an entree into the site for people who just came to read one post.

Many readers will leave the site after reading only one they read the post they came for, but if you make it easy for them to find your very best work then they might stick around and read more or may even subscribe to your blog feed if they find your content compelling enough.

Limit the use of title tags and categories and use just the one that is most important. You should highlight only the important categories and put the others on a different page. Using too many tags will create a bunch of links that aren't really useful. The best practice is to use tags for just the most important keywords.

Make sure that you create a Google News sitemap and that you optimize all the images. Publishers should submit special sitemaps to the search engines that are used to properly index the pages of your site. A sitemap is a dynamic XML file that the search engine spiders use to index the content on your site.