To optimize your whole site for search engines, you’ll need to follow these basic tips
1. Make the website about one thing.
It can be about other stuff, too, but choose one primary
topic that is most essential to your message.
This step is important, so you may want to do a
little keyword research
before choosing a topic.
2.
Mention keywords where they matter most.
Include your “one thing” in the site title, domain
name, description, tagline, keywords, blog categories, page titles, and page
content.
If you’re on WordPress, you can change a lot of
this in the General
Settings or through a plugin like All in One SEO Pack (which
I use).
3.
Link to internal pages on your site.
A lot of content management systems automatically
do this, but if yours doesn’t, you’ll want to be intentional about linking to
your most important pages directly from your homepage and cross-linking them
with each other.
4.
Use a permalink structure that includes keywords.
Some sites have “ugly” permalink structures that use numbers to
identify pages.
Don’t do this. It’s bad for SEO and just doesn’t
look good.
Use a URL structure that includes text, and make
sure you include keywords in your URLs.
So instead of having a page’s URL be this:
https://yoursite.com/?p=12
It should look more like this:
https://yoursite.com/coolpage/
5.
Remove anything that slows down your website.
Page
load times are important, so get rid of any non-essentials that
bog down your website.
These may including music players, large images,
flash graphics, and unnecessary plugins.
6.
Use keywords in your images.
Include words that reflect your site topic in the
image title, description, and alt attributes.
Also, re-title the file name if it doesn’t reflect
your main keywords (e.g. writing-tips.jpg instead of d1234.jpg).
7.
Link to other websites with relevant content.
You can do this by including a blogroll, link list,
or resources page on
your website.
Of course, do it sparingly, as each outbound link
is a “vote” for another site. However, if you do it well and people click your
links, this tells search engines you are a trusted authority on your particular
topic.
8.
Update your website frequently.
Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than
those with static content. That’s why blogs and directories (like Wikipedia) do
so well on search engines. They are constantly being updated with new content.
9.
Make sure your website is indexed in search engines.
A lot of search engines will automatically find and
index your content, but don’t count on it.
You want to be sure engines like Google, Bing, and
Yahoo are crawling your site, so that people are finding you online. (You can
add them directly, if they’re not.)
10.
Have other websites link to you.
This is really, really important, when it comes to
SEO. The bummer is that it’s not something you can necessarily control. Other
than creating excellent content, the only thing you can do is ask (which
occasionally works).
