SEO Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization

With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort.

With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort.


SEO, or search engine optimization is the method of using both technical and not so technical techniques to insure that people that are interested in the things on your site, will be able to find it.

I did some online research and received some great tips from other site managers on how I could improve the SEO for my website, and I've distilled those tips into some basics that are relevant to any content site that wants more search engine traffic.

Sites that are just starting out should focus on getting plenty of incoming links. This is what Google uses to rank sites. More inbound links equals more authority.

When you are trying to increase traffic it's important to remember no to go overboard with your SEO efforts. Google will catch on and lower your sites ranking if you create dummy pages and links for the sole purpose of increasing the exposure to your site for a specific keyword.

With those caveats in mind, lets look at some of the best SEO tips to implement.

Get both inbound and outbound links. While Google ranks your sites importance on the number of inbound links coming from other sites, it gives much more weight to in links from authority sites.

2. Headlines and title tags should have keywords up front. As you consider SEO for your site, think about the important keywords that people might search for in Google that would bring up your site.

Search engines tend to put more weight on keywords earlier in the page title. One fallout of having these keyword-filled headlines is that you can't be as creative as tabloid newspapers can be.

3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include keywords. Similarly, it's important that the URL for each story contains the keywords from your headline and even the category for the story.

Page descriptions should be eliminated if they are not unique. If you simply insert the pages first sentence or use the exact same Meta description on every page, it's not even as relevant as the description that Google can easily pull from the site. If your Meta description is the same on every page you are better off without it.

5. Highlight your best 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 visitors will leave the site after reading just one post, but if you make it simple for them to locate your best work then they might just stick around and read more or subscribe to your blog feed if they find your content compelling enough.

Limit tags and categories to the most important ones. Highlight only the most important categories and put the rest on another page. Too many tags causes there to be links that aren't very useful. It's better to limit tags to the most important keywords.

7. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images. Google recommends that publishers submit special "sitemaps" to help the search engine to index your pages. Sitemaps are dynamic XML files that you submit to Google and are used by their spider to index your content.