Basic SEO Tips that Will Help Promote Your Site

Posted by: Clayne on September 30, 2010 Under: SEO |

There are hundreds of websites, articles, courses and more that cover the topic of SEO. Yet many people still get stuck when it comes to learning the first steps. It’s certainly possible to teach yourself how to do it, but many get frustrated and quit. The fact is, you can’t be impatient about SEO, as results take time and work to achieve. You have to take the time to learn and apply the right techniques before you can expect success. You can make a productive start by applying the following SEO techniques.

Submitting your site to directories to build quality backlinks is one technique that is often overlooked. Don’t try to submit your link to every single directory on the web, as there are hundreds of them. The search engines don’t like to see too much activity done in a short time, and they may view this as spam. But there are bigger directories such as the Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ, where you should aim to get listed because it will give you a major push in your rankings. It’s harder to get listed by these directories, and the whole process is designed to weed out low quality sites, but it’s worth the effort. You cannot impress the search engines with metatags as much as in the past, but the description and keywords metatags are still important to focus on. You want to use these not only for the search engines, but also for your targeted visitors. Your site’s description is summarized in the description metatag. This description is what people using search engines will see. There are a number of things you need to be aware of with SEO, tiny things that matter. Apart from that, fill in your relevant keywords in the keywords tag. How can you tell if it’s relevant or not? Quite simply, any keywords that you use in the keywords metatag should play an important role in your site’s overall content. Your site will not get a high rank if the search engines cannot see that the keywords are relevant to your site.

If you have duplicate content on your site such as archives, folder names, file names, etc. then you should consider having a robots.txt file, so that the search engines know what pages to crawl and what to ignore. You use this file to ignore those pages that have duplicate content, so that they don’t appear in the search engine results and cause problems. While you use this file to exclude a few pages from getting indexed, you should use a sitemap to tell the search engines where to actually go on your site. It’s a way to guide their spiders through your site.

All in all, there’s a lot to learn as far as search engine optimization is concerned. The more you go deeper, the more you’ll find out. You can only learn one step at a time, however. If you are committed to learning a little at a time, you will eventually know a great deal. To become really knowledgeable about SEO will take time, as there is so much to learn. Having a good grasp of the above guidelines, however, will make it much easier for you to progress to the next level.