Few simple SEO tips to increase your page ranking

Today it's all about Search Engine Optimization. Unless you are a massive global brand and have your adverts all over the place, you must spent some time to optimize your website to get noticed on the Internet. Well optimized and naturally indexed website will give you a lot more traffic and therefore - more customers.

In this article I will mention few steps to increase page rank in Search Engines.

1. Use valid XHTML

It is always easier for web crawlers to understand the structure of your website if it's written using valid XHTML. Remember to close all html tags, pay attention to things like default doctype, default document language and defined character encoding.

You can always validate your website using W3C HTML validator. But remember, don't get too solicitous about it, even if validator returns few errors it does not destroy your SEO efforts. There are thousands of poorly-coded website out there, but they index well because of their content.

2. Use h1-h6 headers, use <ul> tag for lists

Structure, structure, structure! Every page should have meaningful header describing the content below. Preferable, main header should be placed in <h1> tag, any other sub-sections should be divided with <h2> - <h6> headers.

Additionally, any listings on the page should be placed in <ul> tag, for example: main website menu, footer links or any other natural lists. This improves the way web-crawler is indexing your menu links and it also improves accessibility.

3. Use meta tags correctly

Very common mistake when working on SEO is stuffing meta-keywords tag with hundreds of keywords often not related to the content of the page.

Second mistake is to duplicate meta-description tag (or page <title> tag) across many pages. Google believes every page under different url is unique, therefore neither meta description nor page <title> should be the same.

4. Content is King

Even best optimized website, with valid XHTML and proper page structure won't index well if content on the page is rubbish or there is no content at all.

Do you sell football tickets? Do you want to attract more customers to use your car wash? Whatever is the topic of your website, create few 'unnecessary' sub pages with articles about 'best teams of the league' / about 'best ways to keep your car body nice and shiny'. This content maybe sounds useless from 'business point of view', but it will be indexed by Search Engines and therefore bring more visitors to your website. Every time when you write something keep in your head keywords you are interested in.

But remember, duplicated content is pure evil, so avoid copying articles from other websites. Especially Google penalizes websites with same content. If the same text already exists on Wikipedia, search engine has no reason to push you up in the search results.

5. Don't rely on scripts and applets (Flash, Java)

JavaScript based menus, entire websites built in Flash, fancy Java plugins are the worst enemies of SEO.

Every web-crawler when opening the page sees it in the raw, code format. Any on-load scripts or flash objects don't have any meaning, because they don't produce any text-based output without help of web browser.

Does it mean we are not allowed to use JavaScript/Flash/Java on our websites? No! We can still use it, we just need to make sure there is always equivalent text-based functionality supplied. This will not only improve your SEO but also improve website accessibility for those who must rely on screen-readers.

6. Use clean urls

Google likes clean links, so it is always better to keep content under easily readable url. Nice links also attract more users because link itself tells everything about the page behind it. Compare this two:

• http://front-end-developer.net/css
• http://front-end-developer.net/taxonomy/term/2

When you look at the first one it is easy to say there must be something related to CSS behind that link. Second links doesn't give this opportunity.

Another benefit of nice urls is 'compatibility' with anchor text. When Google Bot is parsing the website, it is looking for <a> tags, and when it finds it, it goes to defined in href attribute page recording the anchor text. This remembered anchor text will later become a keyword to accessed page.

When url matches the anchor link it is more likely page will index well.

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7. Do not replace text with images

Very common mistake is to use images as page navigation. Image based navigation looks pretty, but it does not have valuable anchor text. Setting alt attribute partially fixes the problem, but still, there is a better solution. This is how normal image navigation would look like:

HTML code: <div id="myMenu"> <a href="#home"><img src="/examples/home-tab.png" alt="Home" /></a> <a href="#music"><img src="/examples/music-tab.png" alt="Music" /></a> <a href="#sport"><img src="/examples/sport-tab.png" alt="Sport" /></a> </div>

Result:

And this is improved version:

#myMenu { list-style-type:none; }
#myMenu a { height:41px; display:block; 
            float:left; overflow:hidden; text-indent:-1000px; }
#myMenu .tab-home { background:url(/examples/home-tab.png); width:88px; }
#myMenu .tab-music { background:url(/examples/music-tab.png); width:89px; }
#myMenu .tab-sport { background:url(/examples/sport-tab.png); width:89px; }

<ul id="myMenu">
    <li><a class="tab-home" href="#home">Home</a></li>
    <li><a class="tab-music" href="#products">Music</a></li>
    <li><a class="tab-sport" href="#contact">Sport</a></li>
</ul>

As you can see I completely removed <img> tags from HTML code. I created list where I placed standard anchor links and styled it from CSS. I correctly placed anchor text inside link tag, so this menu can be correctly read by search engines.

The real trick here is in CSS overflow:hidden; and text-indent:-1000px;. Both properties are simply moving text outside the visible area of the button. Text is still there, but CSS hides it from the user.

This is a very useful trick, because we can still use good looking images and we do not lose advantages of SEO friendly anchor text.

8. Build relations

Let other people know about your website. Submit it to various search engines, use social-networking tools to promote your content. Sometimes one good article picked up by online community can quickly promote entire website. Digg, Twitter, Facebook are the examples here.

9. Don't cheat

Google is not stupid. Link-farming, signing up to dodgy link-exchanging websites, irrelevant keywords on the page - all these things will dash your efforts. Everything what sounds too good to be true usually is just a piece of rubbish. Work hard, improve your content and you will improve your PageRank.

10. Be patient

Be patient, it might take up to 6 months to see the effect of SEO but if you did it correctly it will bring expected results.

Don't be afraid to experiment - create different sub-page with different content and different structure. Check which keywords are more popular using Google Trends and adequately optimize your page.

..to infinity and beyond

I am sure I forgot about dozens of other useful tips to improve website PageRank. I might update this article in the future, but I believe that for now this first ten rules if applied correctly, will significantly improve your on-line visibility.