Saturday, January 10, 2009

SEO Checklist (part 1)

Everyone wants to rank high in all search engine, and that is no longer a secret. To have your site sitting on the top of the search results IS a lot of hard work that usually takes years to accomplish. Now what I have here is a simple to-do list that could improve your site in search engine's eyes. If anyone is quite familiar with SEO, then you may have known some (if not all) of these onpage optimization:

1. IMPORTANT! The first thing you should do is to find yourself a targeted keyword on which you would like to optimize your blog. A simple example is when you have a cooking blog, don't optimize your blog for the search term 'food' because you'll be competing with millions of websites (my search in Google today for 'food' results in 856,000,000 sites, and that's quite a competition). Instead, opt for something like 'make your own dessert' which only results in 1,700,000 sites (compare that to 856 million...). Once you got a keyword or two, let's move on.

2. Make your title as short as possible while maintaining your targeted keywords. So 'Blogging Tips, Tricks, & Tutorials' is so much better than 'Many blogging tips that could make your blog looks nicer and attract more traffic to your blog'. Short titles will make each word in it be valued more by search engines.

3. Emphasize your keywords by bolding, italicizing, and underlining. Words like these: 'blogging tutorial' or 'blogging tips and tricks' will make it more noticable to search engines. Note that you must do this method in a normal (ordinary) way; you can't just bolden or underline every word in the sentence as this could be considered as a fraud/spam website trying to gain attention from search engines.

4. Using <h1> tag for your keywords can be a big boost. <h1> tag is a header tag. It can be considered as a tag to make the title of your blog or website. For those of you who are familiar with html, you sure can go through this step with no problem; but for those who doesn't, here's how you do it: type <h1>your-keyword-here</h1>. If I type <h1>Blogging tutorial</h1>, the result would be:

Blogging tutorial

Note that the most favorable place to put this is at the top of the page, like this blog (the big 'Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials' at the top is made using a text gadget with the <h1> tag).

5. Use your keyword sparingly; don't overload a page with so many of your keywords in unappropriate places (eg. one paragraph have more than 20 'cooking' keyword in it). Search engine will think that this site is a spam (again). Use it only when needed.
Well, that's all for now folks, but remember that part 2 is yet to come. So do your best with these right now but DO NOT expect to get the 1st position in search results all in a sudden. These tips are technically proven to raise your position but again it depends on how you implements it.

Stay tuned for part 2; subscribe to this blog or follow it for the best convenience.

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