SEO Tips & Tweaks – Some Timeless Ranking Factors and Some Outdated Ones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

How to Optimise Your Website For Local Search Traffic

With search engine optimisation getting more and more competitive, it can be tough to reach the top of the search engines for highly competitive keywords. For popular keywords it can take months and a great deal of cash to get anywhere near the top but that doesn't mean your website is destined to sit at the bottom of the listings though. Search engine optimisation is all about finding niches and thinking as a search engine user so you can predict what people will search for.

Whether your company has a small or large marketing budget, you can make an impact in the search engines by focusing on highly targeted keywords. Optimising your site for a very broad term such as 'search engine optimisation company' is unlikely to bring you much traffic as there will be hundreds or even thousands of companies out there who are also targeting that keyword. Instead of broad terms include local key search phrases in your website copy such as 'SEO Leeds' so local businesses looking for local service providers can find you.

How to incorporate local search terms in your website copy
Thankfully the days of cramming multiple keywords into website copy have just about gone with many businesses opting for fewer keywords and quality content instead. The next time you review your keywords and website copy consider these tips below...

• Local speech
Depending on where you are in the country, people will speak in different ways and call certain items different names. If you're looking to attract local traffic then consider how people in that area will search for your service by the way they talk. For example, local people tend to shorten local place names such as referring to 'Scunthorpe' as 'Scunny'. People who live in the North of England use different words to describe different items to people in the South and these can vary greatly from city to city. Decide on the terms which are used in the areas you want to encourage local traffic and use these in your website copy. Another aspect to optimise your site for includes covering the local area of a town or city. If you optimise your website for 'SEO Leeds' then make sure you also cover the term 'SEO West Yorkshire'.

• Contact page
The Contact page on your website is the ideal place to mention the areas that your business operates in. Most Contact pages have the business address but try adding a paragraph above this to encourage people to contact you as this will give you another opportunity to add a keyword to the copy. You could also include the local areas you operate in and also exact towns and locations in the copy. Consider adding a footer to each page of your website which features your company name and address - this is good practice from the website visitors' point of view as well as it means people can easily find your contact details.

Make sure you harness local traffic looking for local services in your area by using these simple tips to optimise your website with highly targeted keywords.

SEO Leeds

How To Increase Search Engine Traffic

The key to increase search engine traffic is quite simple. Follow this formula and you will be successful:

1. Research high traffic keywords in your niche

Use Word Tracker's free keyword research tool and identified some long-tailed keywords that don't have a lot of competition. Simply type in the keywords from Word Tracker into the Google search engine and note the 'results' on the right-hand side. Any keyword phrase with over 50 searches per day and under 500,000 results in Google is a pretty good and will increase your search engine traffic and ranking. Of course, there are far better, so don't stop on the first one that jumps out at you, get a good list.

2. Write articles for your website or blog that include a keyword phrase in them 2-4% of the time. Increase search engine traffic by out writing your competitors. Most webmasters are bad at writing keyword targeted articles, which makes it easy for you to out rank them.

Make sure to put your keyword phrase in your title and header with other words to boost interest. For example, for "Aluminum Bats" I'd put something like, "Aluminum Bats - Whack! Swing Away Kid" or something that stresses benefit like, "Now Hit Farther than Ever with Aluminum Bats". You want to get clicked on to increase your search engine traffic, so a good title is crucial, both for ranking well and getting visitors to click.

3. Now you need to get these pages noticed and build up some link juice. Search engines love sites that have lots of links pointing to them and that will increase your ranking and traffic. You can do this by posting on other blogs, forums, trading links, etc., but this can be a long and time consuming process.

If you want fast results without paying then I'd suggest using a backlinks tool to save you time and build viral links naturally, so you can focus on writing more articles to increase search engine traffic to your website.

Find out how to get 100s of free natural backlinks in 30 minutes.

-Article written by Scott Million