1. Links – The single most important aspect of SEO is the number of links that point to your website. Make sure your site have AS MANY RELEVANT LINKS INTO IT AS POSSIBLE. Note the emphasis on RELEVANT LINKS. This means you have to make sure that the sites linking to you have content very similar to what your website offers. To check out which sites link to you type: link: www.mysite.com in Google.
2. Directory Inclusion – Submit your site to Internet Directories such as The Open Directory Project and Yahoo. Make sure you submit your site to ‘industry-related’ directories as well.
3. Site Map – Creating a site map or a page with links to the major sections of your website not only makes it easier for the search engines to crawl your website but makes it easier for your visitors as well.
4. Title tag – Make sure the title tags of ALL the web pages in your site are relevant to the CONTENT of the page. Also, this is one of the best places to put in keywords you want to rank high in. Note however that the title tag should be short, preferably less than 8 words.
For example:
<title>EACOMM Corporation Philippines : Web, Multimedia, Software Design
and Development</title>
Note the utilization of keywords relevant to our website.
The Title Tag is one of the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT things you can change in your webpages to make them more Search Engine Friendly.
5. Description Metatag – Similar to the Title Tag, make this UNIQUE for each page, describing in at most 20 words what EACH WEB PAGE contains. Again, sprinkle your keywords freely here but make sure it’s structured in sentence/paragraph form.
For Example:
<meta content=”Our key competencies are:
Web Design and Development, Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO), E-Commerce Site Development and Web Programming using PHP and MySQL on a Linux platform running Apache.” name=”description” />
6. Keyword Metatag – Not so important and questionable if still being tapped by search engines, but just to be safe you can populate this with the keywords you want. Again, preferably unique for each page.
Here’s an example of the Keyword metatag for eacomm.com:
<meta content=”eacomm, multimedia, software, web, website, multi, media, authoring, author, interactive, design, designer, develop, developer, CD, CD-ROM, CDROM, CDR, CDRW, philippines, philippine, filipino, pilipinas, database, sql, mysql, access, oracle, webdeveloper, graphics, artist, illustrator, engineer, engineering, electronics, computer, communications, flash, macromedia, director, lingo, dreamweaver, cdyearbook, yearbook, cdrom yearbook, company, profile, kiosk, infokiosk, unix, linux, windows, NT, 98, 2000, embedded, systems, microcontroller, hc11,68hc11, zilog, z80, images, photos, corporations, avp, audio, video, presentation, advertising, structured, cabling, lan, wan, wireless, broadband, multimedia authoring, software development,designing, hosting, IT, information, technology, solutions, consultancy, strategy, strategic, planning” name=”keywords” />
Around 50 keywords to 100 keywords are typically acceptable here, but again, the effect on your ranking is minimal.
7. Use of the Header Tag. Google ranks text contained in header tags higher than regular text in html documents. Make sure you main webpage headings are tagged
<h1>, subheadings:</h1> <h2>up to</h2> <h6>.To avoid having overly large text, use CSS on the header tags like so:
H1 {text-decoration:none;
font-weight:bold;
font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans serif;
font-size: 12px;
color:#000000;}