Getting Started with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

There are many methods of improving the ranking of your website in the search engines, but for long-term success, you should only use the honest, white-hat tactics. There are various search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques that every webmaster should use. These are the SEO tactics that do not detract from the overall quality of your site and the experience of your visitors. Consider the tips below for improving not only your search engine ranking, but also the experience of your visitors. Using these tactics is now more important than ever as search engines continually evolve to favour higher quality content.

Provide Unique Content

Write for your human visitors and not for the search engines. This is what all of the search engines recommend. Your audience is going to be a human one, so you want to be able to provide useful content that your visitors are going to enjoy reading and, hopefully, share with friends and colleagues through social networking sites or other means.

Providing unique content is absolutely essential. While there's nothing stopping you from posting your own content on multiple sites, duplicate content is penalized by the search engines and thus it's not ideal for SEO purposes.

Optimise Your Pages

While you should, first and foremost, be writing for your human audience, you should also optimize the content of your site in such a way that it is easier for the search engines to categorize and rank.  One of the key elements of successful SEO is using key words and phrases which are relevant to the content of each article.

Choose these key words and phrases carefully in order to find the right compromise between level of competition and the number of searches that those keywords receive each month. Your chosen keywords should appear in page headings, titles, meta tags, descriptions and the body of the text itself. While using keywords in this way is important, stay away from keyword stuffing. Overusing keywords makes for low-quality content that is not easily readable and, in the longer term, you'll only find your site being marked down as spam. Avoid overusing keywords at all costs.

Internal Linking

Aside from using key words and phrases in the actual written content of your site, it's extremely important that the structure of the site is search engine-friendly as well. To make sure that this is the case, you need to understand how search engines work when they crawl your site and attempt to index each individual page of it.

A lot of content is cannot be indexed. Internal linking makes it easier for the search engines to navigate your site. Place links to other articles on your site and include a site index or site map as well. Search engine crawlers can't navigate your site via complex scripts or drop-down menus. While it's important to have a user-friendly site that is a pleasure to navigate, you should always use internal linking as well, if only for the sake of SEO.

Reciprocal Linking

The more links to your website you have out there on the web, the better. It provides greater exposure for your content and it boosts your search engine ranking. Exchanging links doesn't have to cost anything either.

It's important to exchange links appropriately. You should only exchange links with webmasters running relevant websites, sites which your own visitors might actually be interested in. Make sure that you share links only with reputable websites and avoid working with link farms and low-quality sites.