3 SEO Basic Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings Today!

There are a lot of small details in the world of SEO that are important to understand in order to maximize your SEO campaign. Everything from PageRank sculpting using rel=nofollow, to XML sitemap feeds, to analyzing competitor backlinks. But some of the biggest gains in SEO can be accomplished by paying attention to the basics. Here are my top three basic SEO tips we apply at our search engine optimization firm that can help you increase your search engine rankings TODAY!

1. Keyword focused Page Titles - You would think in 2008 that every man, woman and child in America would know that having keywords in your Page Title is step 1 to actually getting ranked for those same keywords. Ok, so maybe I am overstating it just a little. *lol* But I still see a huge number of clients and potential clients that have web sites with the same page title on every page of the site, or with little or no keyword focus.
   
   Incidentally I have said this before and will continue to do so. Limiting page titles to 64 characters because that's all Google displays is not good for usability or SEO. Page titles should primarily serve as a reference point for users as to what the content of the page, and even the web site, is relevant to. Page titles should convey as much relevant information to the user as possible and should read like intelligent sentences. Personally I limit page titles to about 150 characters as this is near the upper limit of what we have found that Yahoo will actually index and is close to the maximum number of characters that most users are capable of seeing in their browser. Of course many of the page titles I create are no where near 150 characters, it just depends on what is called for based on the keywords and content found on the page.


2. Homepage Alt Tag - In Google, a link is a vote. Even if the link comes from your own web site. So my motto is, vote for yourself early, and often! If you don't vote for yourself, who else will? And one of the most powerful ways you can vote for yourself is via the Alt Tag (The alt="" attribute of the image tag.) on your homepage logo. Most web sites have a company logo that they link back to their homepage. And all too often that Alt tag lacks keyword focus. Most commonly the alt tag is equivalent to the company name. That's great if you are having a hard time getting ranked for your company name. But in order to maximize the SEO benefit of that link, it is much better to use at least a couple keywords in the overall phrase.
   
   According the Matt Cutts Alt tag video, Alt tags should be around 4 to 7 words in general. I lean a little closer to 7 most of the time myself as I believe that good, detailed Alt tags help with both usability and accessibility as well as SEO. For example, if I was writing an alt tag for Sony PlayStation, instead of "Sony PlayStation" as my Alt tag, I would use "Sony PlayStation Video Games and Game Systems". This tag not only conveys useful information to the end user, but also helps the search engines understand that Sony PlayStation is relevant for phrases like "video games", "video games", "video game systems" and many other phrases based on the permutations that can be derived from the keywords found in the Alt tag.
   
   This same concept should be applied to all image links, especially any images you might have in your global navigation.


3. Internal Linking - As previously discussed, a link is a vote. And while external links are certainly a huge driver of search engine rankings, internal links can often times yield very powerful results if leveraged correctly. One of the best ways to use internal linking to augment your rankings is to simply find occurrences of the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and make sure those phrases are all linked to the same page within your site. You can usually find a number of different pages on your site that mention any particular keyword phrase you are targeting. Linking all these occurrences to the same page sends a strong signal to the search engines that the page being linked to is relevant for that keyword text. This can be a very fruitful exercises if you have a blog as many people do not take enough time to link blog content to Web site content.
   
   It's good to do this exercise on a monthly or semi-monthly basis using not only the keywords that you have identified that you want to rank for, but just as importantly, the keywords you already rank for. This is especially true for the long tail keyword referrals that can be seen in your analytics report. It's very common to get a good lift for long tail keywords by just adding a handful of internal links as many of the longer tail phrases are not that competitive.

So there is your SEO plan for the day:

1 - Evaluate and add keyword focus to ALL the page titles in your Web site (do the Meta description tag too!).
2 - Add keyword focus to all image Alt tags, especially images that link
3 - Evaluate opportunities within your site to link keyword phrases you are targeting (as well as phrases that you are currently ranked for), back to the pages that have the best chance to rank highly for them. Do this on a consistent and ongoing basis.

See you at the top of the search engines! Have a great week.

Catfish