SEO Tips & Tweaks – Some Timeless Ranking Factors and Some Outdated Ones

The search engine optimization industry has been one of the most dynamic ones. It always keeps web masters and website owners on their toes as they strive to get their websites on the top of search engine results.

Search engines like Google frequently change their algorithms of which, some of which they announce and some of which are left for us to guess. Either ways, we have to keep up out optimization efforts in order to preserve the rankings and make it score higher. However, in spite of the changes and updates, there are several practices that remain consistent throughout i.e. they are as relevant in today's time as they were in the past.

Here are some timeless SEO tips and tweaks that would help you improve your website ranking in search results.

Title Tags

Search engines place increased importance on the title tags of web pages. In fact, the title tags are one of the most important SEO elements of a web page. Good title tags are defined by their effective summarization of the web page in relevant words. All the pages of your website should have a unique and keyword rich title tags. These tags not only inform the search engines about the page contents but also appear in the search results and tell users about the contents.

Anchor Text

The visible text of the link is called the Anchor Text. One of the most important SEO ranking factor is the number of inbound links and the text that is used to connect the link hold increased importance. This is because the text that is used for the links also get indexed by the search engine crawlers and affects your rankings. For example if you sell T-shirts online and there is an external link that says 'Find Customized T-shirts Here' it would be a whole deal better to link the words 'customized T-shirts' than 'here'. This is the same case with your internal linking as well. Therefore, try and use descriptive 'keyword-rich' text for your links while linking to your own web pages.

Quantity of Inbound Links

With links, what is more important than the number of links is the number of unique domains they are coming from. If you have 100 inbound links coming from 50 different domains, it is actually better than having 1000 links coming from 5 domains. It is all about how dispersed and extended your link architecture is rather than how dense it is.

Social Media

Social media is a very powerful media to establish your presence and extend your business on the web. Social media websites like Facebook and Twitter offer enormous opportunities to plagiarize your content and increase your linking on the web. They can act as efficient traffic generating sources if used correctly.

Just as there are these basic SEO tweaks, there are also certain practices that have become outdated and don't work anymore. Here are some of them.

H1 Tags

They were a rage in the past because they informed the search engine crawlers about the increased importance of the particular text just because of the increased size. What happened was a little bit of CSS was used to specify H1 tags just anywhere and everywhere. However, at present H1 tags don't have all that importance.

Keyword Density

This was an important SEO consideration sometime back until people started stuffing keywords in the text to get a high density. As of now, there is no important placed on them. Rather, what is important is having good and highly valuable content.

Kabir Bedi works as a senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, a reputed web development company based in India, that specializes in providing a full range of web design services, website maintenance services and search engine optimization services. He has over 10 years of experience in the web industry.