Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Charles Sipe. Please read more about Charles in the footer.
Below are some simple steps to improve SEO!
1. Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the easiest ways to improve your website’s SEO and yet few sites really take advantage of this tactic. A good internal link includes a keyword phrase on one of your pages that links to another page on your site that is specifically about that topic.
For instance if you mention “gummy bear recipes“, you would link that keyword phrase to your site’s page that is about gummy bear recipes. This helps spread Page Rank throughout your site and also makes it easier for Google’s spiders to access your page about gummy bear recipes. A site that does this really well is Wikipedia, and they are near the top of thousands of search results.
2. Simple flat navigation
The ideal site navigation is as flat as possible, meaning that search engines can access a lot of pages within the first few click-levels from your homepage.
If your blog has 10 links on the homepage which go to pages that each link to 10 pages, then search engines can get to 110 pages with just two clicks. This is important from an SEO standpoint because the Page Rank (Google’s opinion about a reputation of a page) typically decreases for each additional level that a page is from the homepage.
Therefore, a page that is two click-levels away will have a higher Page Rank than a page that is 3 or 4 click-levels away (if the number of external links to the page are equal). If you have a blog, one easy way to make your navigation flatter, is by linking to the top categories from your home page which goes to a page that lists all the posts about that topic. Another easy way is to implement sitemaps.
3. XML and HTML Sitemaps
Sitemaps can give your site an added boost by improving accessibility to the pages on your site for both users and search engines. An XML Sitemap can generate a list of every page on your site that is easy for search engines to read.
HTML sitemaps are pages that list the top sections of your site so that it is easier for users to navigate to the section they want. If your blog uses WordPress, installing the plugin “Google XML Sitemaps” is an easy way to implement an XML sitemap.
4. Include Keywords Your Target Audience Searches For
Find out which specific keywords that your target audience searches for and include them in both the title and the article itself. Conducting keyword research ensures that there are enough people that are looking for a given topic, and including the phase on your page helps Google match your page with people searching for that phrase.
Using Google’s Keyword Tool helps you find topics that people are actively looking for. For instance “gummy bear recipes” has 1900 monthly searches and almost no competition. On the other hand “gumball recipes” doesn’t show up at all, suggesting that it is probably not a popular topic. If you use “gummy bear recipes” in your title and also include it in your article, it greatly improves your chances of showing up in the search results for this specific keyword phrase. However, you do not need to stuff the keyword 20 times into your article, which does not help.
5. Blogging regularly
It is pretty surprising how many businesses have started a blog, but update it infrequently. Writing blog posts on a regular basis tells Google that it should check back more frequently for new content. It also adds to the total number of pages on your site, which improves the chances that a page on your site is relevant to a given search query.
Blogs that get a lot of traffic from SEO, typically have many more posts than a blog that has little traffic. For instance Problogger has 5,950 pages in Google’s index according to WebsiteGrader.com and they get about 190,000 visitors per month according to Compete.
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nice beginners article