Free SEO & Link Building Tips

Domain Names

The first thing to consider is what domain name to buy. The search engines have favored keywords in the domain since the beginning days of SEO. Plain and simply you have an advantage with SEO if your keywords are in your domain name. But you want to make sure your domain name isn't too long or contains too many hyphens in it. I once bought some domain names with two hyphens and three keywords in them and I no longer promote these sites. The reason is these long domain names kill branding and look like the spam they are. When considering a domain name you want to try and get a good keyword or two in while having a name your visitors care to remember. Our site Linkateer is an example of just that; we have a distinct advantage with any keywords containing the word link. And yet we have a site name you won't easily forget and one worth branding.

Keyword Research

I can't say enough about keyword research, targeting the right keywords is critical and can make or break your SEO campaign. Search Engine Optimizers has a great service including a free keyword tool that is very useful in finding the right keywords. You want to find keywords that people are looking for on the search engines but ones that not everyone is targeting with SEO. Some keyword tools will actually show you the search results compared with the queries for a particular keyword. This makes it easy to see which keywords are highly searched and not as competitive. Be sure and include a good balance and don't just go after the most popular keywords. Include some that are highly searched, some that are in the middle range and some on the lower end. Theming your keywords is also important. If your site is about SEO, you may want to go after keywords that contain the same root and are similar. So going after SEO, SEO Company, SEO Services, SEO Expert, etc. is better than going after SEO, search engine marketing, high rankings, website promotion and link building. Theming your keywords ensures that the optimization you do will cross benefit all your keywords. If you build a link with 'SEO' in the link text then this will help your other keywords that also contain this root.

SEO Copywriting

Be sure and include your top 3 or 4 keywords in the title of your homepage, in your meta keywords and description, and near the top of your page. Search engines see the keywords in your title and at the top as your most important. If you can do this in a sentence then all the better. If not you can separate your keywords with either commas, pipes, or even colons. Then continue to sprinkle these keywords throughout the site along with different variations of them. For example if your targeting 'link building' then you may also want to include another variation of it such as 'link building services'. Also include the parts of your keywords alone, for example if your keyword is 'SEO Services', then include 'SEO' on its own as well as 'services'.

Make sure you do not put too many occurrences of your keywords on a page. One occurrence every couple paragraphs is fine with also the variations and parts sprinkled throughout the page. To start and on a newer site you should not necessarily go after the most competitive keyword phrases, but rather start from the lower to middle tier. As you build your site up and get some good link juice coming in, you can then go after more difficult keywords. But better to have some traffic coming in on those lesser searched keywords then none on the higher ones.

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Link Building

Make sure your SEO knows what they are doing when it comes to link building. This is one area where your SEO can really hurt your site's reputation with the search engines. All forms of spam should be avoided including link farms, automated link exchange sites, free for all link sites, and the like. Your SEO should be building you relevant one way links from trusted sources. Having your SEO build you 1,000 garbage links will get you no where. Quality rules the day and one good link can often out perform 100 garbage ones. Don't make the mistake of thinking the more links your SEO builds the better. Focus more on the quality of the links and how they are moving your site up the search engines. If just a handful of great links are moving you to top positions then your SEO is doing their job.

Web page optimization and design

There are many things that need consideration when planning the optimization and design of a website or page. Most importantly, do not plan and build a site or page specifically just for the search engine spiders. It is rumoured GoogleBot has been trained to understand English sentence structure, so writing just to include keywords and making gobbledygook sentences could do more harm than good.

Use a clean friendly page url, like the one on this page, /page_design.html. It basically tells people and robots what the page is about, is clean and friendly.

A web page or site does not have to be w3 compliant. They are a self-appointed governing body, and are not the Internet design police who will arrest you if your website does not comply. Your site WILL NOT be penalized in Google results if your site isn't compliant. Anyone who tells you different is either trying to sell your an optimization package or is a coder who doesn't understand seo. Designers do not make the best optimizers. Marketers are usually the best search engine optimization consultants. Matt Cutts stated on his seo blog that w3 compliance IS NOT taken into consideration as many older documents that contain really good information are that old they do not comply, however the information contained is much more important to users than newer websites and documents that are w3 compliant. No weight is given to the fact that your website is or isn't w3 compliant. Bear in mind that your average customer will probably not know what w3 schools, or its website compliancy standards are anyway. At the end of the day, Google is trying to find the best information it can for its search results, not the most prettiest or best designed site.

Use a different page title on every page getting your most important keywords in there. We tend to use spacers to separate the words. When we first built this site, this was a rare occurrence, however, when our competitors, and competitors of our clients saw how it makes listings stand out in search results, they started to copy. The use of spacers is not a vital part of search engine optimization, it is mainly for aesthetics, but getting a good list of important keywords is. Google reads up to 69 characters in a page title. Keeping your page title at this level using keywords that are relevant to the actual web page we help GoogleBot crawl your site faster. He or she is currently trying to index billions of pages, so the more help you can give it to index the page faster, the better it should be. Also using long page titles could be construed as keyword spamming, and could ultimately drop your search listings and work against your search engine optimization.

Google does not give any importance to Metatags, however, there are still search engines that do. We always use Metatags to help gain the little bits of traffic we get from the metacrawler search engines.

Metadescriptions are a vital part of a website or page design. If Google lists your site after finding the keywords that are searched in your page title, your metadescription will be displayed below your link. It is vital to get this description informative and to also contain your keywords. Google reads about 155 characters, using more can be harmful to your ranking as again it could be construed as keyword spamming.

Try to use only one main font type throughout the site for the aesthetics of the site. This has no bearing on search engine optimisation. Authority sites like the BBC always have their internal page links at the top of the page, where the fold is, or down the right hand side. This works well for Internet surfers, making finding pages on your site quick and easy. Embed links actually inside your page content to relative pages on throughout your site. Some optimization companies will bold and highlight keywords. This has no bearing on seo. However using the keywords to link to other page in the site will help getting a double listing in Google search results. Always link back to your home page using the websites main keyword, in our case, search engine optimisation and try to keep it embedded in content, not at the beginning or the end of a sentence. Stick to this guidelines and you are on the way to having a search friendly website. The next thing you should work on is link building to increase your link popularity.