Have you ever heard of the first link rule? This is when Google only follows the first link to a page, for example : if your page has a link to the home page in the topnav with the anchor text “home” and a link in the footer with the anchor text “your keyword”. The anchor text that appears first in your html will be followed and then the other link(s) to the page will be discarded.

Case Study

Here is Michael Gray’s SEO Blog :

Here I have copied the header and the footer, just to show you an example of how you can avoid this. Using the search status tool bar, I used the function that allows me to highlight all of the no followed links. Notice that the home page has been highlighted, but the other link to the home page with the anchor text “Graywolfs SEO Blog” has not been nofollowed. This is because he is choosing what anchor text he wants to link to the home page with, this makes sense because a lot more people would search for “SEO Blog” or “Graywolfs SEO Blog” than they would “Home page” or “Home”.  By nofollowing the first home page link, Google will not follow this, so effectively the first link back to the home page will be the one in the footer with your chosen anchor text.

Michael must be doing something right as he is well known and respected throughout the industry, his blog has mass traffic and he ranks number 1 for the competitive term “SEO blog” as well as having a strong brand.

Also I noticed by nofollowing links to pages that you are blocking with your robots.txt , you will reduce the amount of “restricted by robots.txt” errors in webmaster tools. By doing this, it could give your page more authority and you could see better rankings, for your chosen keywords.

Everything in SEO is relatively simple, you fall into problems when your website is badly designed. A SEO’s worst nightmare is a website with rubbish code, no access to templates and a CMS with no access to any SEO properties (meta and title tags e.t.c). These can be a complete nightmare to implement any SEO Tips or make any SEO changes.

My advice for people with websites like these to spend your money on a well designed SEO friendly website with access to everything that you need to optimize your site, whether it is dynamic or static. The main points that I find work best in SEO are :

Clean Code

Search engine spiders love valid html, it makes there job to index your content so much easier. Anyway, your html should be always be valid or it is incorrect. Why give Google a chance to punish you for it when you should be doing it anyway!

Internal Link Structure

You should try and limit the amount of external links you have and link to content on your domain as often as you can. This will give each page on your site a good chance to get indexed and crawled regularly. A HTML sitemap could also help with this.

Keyword Density and Content Rich

The pages you are trying to optimize should have lot’s of content. The keywords you are trying to target (usually a maximum of 3 or 4) should have a keyword density percentage of about 0.75% to 1.5% . This will help Google see that your site is highly relevant to the search term. However you shouldn’t try and spam your keywords and make it look un-natural. You should try and aim for over 350 words of content for these densities.

No Re-directs

The pages you are trying to optimize should not have any re-directs. For example when you go to : http://www.someurl.com, it should re-direct to http://www.someurl.com/somesubfolder/home. This is because when people link to http://www.someurl.com the home page that it re-directs to only carries forward a percentage of the weight. Try to avoid them and clean up any links on your site that link to 301 or 302 re-directs.

Hopefully by following this Best practice in SEO, you can cleanly get to where you want to be in the SERPS.

SEO tips are becoming more common and people are optimizing there websites or blog for search engines more and more by the day.

It is getting harder and harder to achieve a good solid rank in the search engines, so you got to take every bit of advice and every piece of useful information on the Internet you read seriously.  Without doing so, you may miss out on massive opportunities to improve your websites ranking.  This would be un-explainably bad with todays competition for every keyword you can think of on the web.

Some top tips to follow are :

• Don’t Keyword Spam – Just make your content read well, so that people will link to it rather than make it a blatent effort to optimize for your main keywords, just remember to include it in the title, the heading, and maybe a couple of times in the body of your content.
• Use a relevant meta description – Without a meta description advertising your page, if your page does appear at the top of the results, people probably won’t click on it because the meta description is poor. You need something that is relevant to the page and markets it effectively.
• Use image alt tags effectively – Don’t just list all the keywords you want to be ranked to for in the alt text. For example if you are trying to sell golf clubs, your alt text shoud be.. “golf clubs” and not “image1″ or “golf clubs, cheap golf clubs, golf balls, golf products”. The alt text is supposed to describe the image and if you can include your keyword in there.. all the better.

Here are just 3 tips that can help you succeed on your journey to the top of Google.  Also remember that good content is normally found at the top of Google , so before you start optimizing your pages, you got to make sure that they are actually worth optimizing. If your not providing good content or a good service then you might aswell give up now.

Even though this whole blog aims to give you SEO tips, I have taken my selected favourite and am going to write about them in this post. These are the strategies that are easiest to implement and will give you the best results (from my experience in SEO).

Use Clean HTML

This is the best thing you can do for SEO in my opinion. How have you got any chance of succeeding in SEO if the search engine crawlers can’t read your code or your page takes forever to load due to un-neccesary html. You should remove all javascript and css to external files and give your html elements classes and id’s to style them. This will reduce the filesize of your page and clean up your code. Make sure your code is valid also using the html validator and the css validator. Google likes neat html that is easy to read. It will also give you a better content to code ratio.

Have A Breadcrumb Trail

You should have a breadcrumb at the bottom of every page on your website, to make it easy for your visitors to navigate back to the home page. It will also give your home page more weight because it will be heavily linked to. This will increase it’s importance and rank in the search engines.

Meta Tag Optimization

This actually doesn’t make a difference to your actual results. All it does is give yourself a chance to advertise your site before people actually click on it. If your meta description is poor then people may not click on to your site as a direct result of that. It is also neccessary to have a description of some sort as it will show up as an error in webmaster tools and i’m assuming Google will punish your rankings because of this.

Good Content

Having good content on your site is the best advice I can give you. It will gain links organically and you are actually trying to promote something useful.  People will not link to bad content and if they have a bad experience on your site, you may find that they may not click through to your site again. I know that sounds like 1 visitor, but maybe all of them could think like that. That would cost you alot of visitors. So don’t write content if it is not useful. Good content will show up on top of the results, you never see anything useless at the top of Google.

In search engine optimization, your content to code ratio needs to be about rite. You should always make sure that you have more content than you do code. Lot’s of un-neccessary code will make your page take longer to open and be harder for the search engine spiders to index and understand. Therefore you will loose valuable spaces in there rankings.

Making sure your code validates is also essential. If you have really good content, but the spiders fail to index it because it can’t understand your code, then it is a complete waste of good content for SEO purposes. If your code doesn’t validate then you have already started fighting a loosing battle. Google will respect your website if you keep your code clean and valid, sticking to there webmaster guidelines.

The webmaster guidelines from Google are definately an essential read. They describe exactly how they want your site to be. If you stick to all this criteria then you have a good chance they will rank you well because of this. The way I see it is that if you put in the time to stick to there rules, they will record you accordingly… it’s just like being back in school.

If you really want to optimize your site they even published there own SEO guide for you too read. Make sure you read there own advice if you want to perform in there search engine. Kind of makes sense really.

A good way of stripping out not needed bits of code is to locate them in an external file. You can do this by moving all inline css within the document to an external css file. You could also do the same with JavaScript. However make sure you don’t do this with the Google Ads as they don’t like you tampering with there code and you may get banned as a result… look it up.

Using correct heading tags throughout your pages is not just good for SEO, but it is also good for general website building. It is how you are supposed to structure your web pages regardless of whether it improves your position in the search engines or not. Using the correct headings is going to get you ranked better in Google, it shows to them that you have took notice of there Webmaster Guidelines and you have considered the usability of your website (something that alot of people forget about). Here is how your page should be structured…

• <h1>Main Title</h1>
  • <h2>Sub title of h1</h2>
  • <h2> Sub title of h1</h2>
    • <h3>Sub title of h2</h2>
    • <h3>Sub title of h2 </h2>
      • <h4>Sub title of h3</h4>

This should continue consistently throughout your website. The more headings with your primary and secondary keywords you have and the more useful they are to the user, the more likely it is that Google or other search engines will realise this and award you accordingly.

However you should not abuse heading tags. If you are using heading tags just to style text then you are using them wrong. You could be sacrificing the usability and your positions in the search engines if they catch on. If you just remember to yourself that your html should accurately represent the structure of your page and remember to stay clear of tables… then you should be fine.

You may not need to use all the heading tags on one page, but if you feel that you need to, I hope this article has helped you understand the correct use of heading tags.

SEO is key to making full use of your website. Search engines handle about 300 million searches each day. If you could get your website to the top for your chosen keyword or niche, imagine the success of your website.

Please note that improving your websites rankins in major search engines will take time. You shouldn’t spend all your time making little tweeks to your website. I beleive you should spend your time creating inbound links and adding lots of quality, relevant content to your website. The more quality, unique pages your site gets indexed in Google, the better your website is going to perform in the results.

The SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) process begins before you start building your website. You should have an idea of the sort of content you are going to add to your website and also your prime keyword or keywords. This will then make it easier when you are going to register a domain-name for your website. The domain-name relevancy of a website pays a major part in search engines when they rank you for a particular keyword.

There is alot of speculation about different on page SEO optimization techniques. It is my opinion that very few of these are true. Google has it’s own Webmaster Guidelines that it asks webmasters to follow for SEO. SO surely if you want to rank well in Google (the biggest search engine in the world), you should follow these? If this is so why are people not doing this, dont bother reading them and doing what they think is right to try and promote there website.

SEO is complex enough with help. You should read everything that Google has to offer, because after all they are the body that is going to be ranking your website. Google even offer a publication for Search Engine Optimization Guidelines you should read everything Google has to offer, this will ensure that you promote your website in the cleanest and most Google friendly way.

My advice for people wanting to learn SEO is don’t. Maybe learn the basics, e.g link building and how PageRank works and you need links to your site. That is all you need to know. The most important factor for ranking well is to become a good website designer rather than a good Search Engine Optimizationist.

By having a nicely designed website it will be easier to increase the links to your site and also reach your goals quicker. It makes sense to stick to Googles policies at the end of the day don’t you think? It will greatly increase your chances of ranking well in the search engines.

Search engine optimization ( SEO ) is the process webmasters take out to help there website perform better in search engines. Optimizing there website to perform well is the aim of the process.

Modern SEO revolves around link building. In general the more links your website has pointing to it. The better it is going to rank. So whenever you get a chance to add a link back to your website always take the opportunity. There are lots of factors that make your website rank well apart from links. For example, the amount of pages your website has indexed, the meta tags, correct title tags and also unique relevant content helps you rank well.

It is important for your content to be good. This will increase the possibility of another website linking to your good content. They are obviously always less likely to link to bad content. Good content will also increase the chance of a customer ( user of your website ) to return. Always spend time ensuring your content is unique, up to date and there is lots of it. Content is king!

When optimizing your site you should note that the html of your website should be a description of the webpage. This means that you should use headers where neccesary and not style tags to make them look like headers. Search engines will not recognize this. Your code should be as clean as possible for your website to rank well.