These are the search engine optimization practices that I employ with most of my websites.

Anchor Text - The anchor text of your website's internal links should contain important keywords. For example, when linking to your homepage, instead of using "Home" as the anchor text, try adding a keyword in front. Example, "Scrapbooking Home" or "Weight Loss Home", etc.

Likewise, when linking from one of your websites to another of your websites, add keywords into the anchor text. If you have a website about search engine optimization, then use the words "search engine optimization" as the anchor text. Don't use anchor text like, "My other website", or "Click here".

Anchor text, I believe, has the greatest ranking factor on popularity-based search engines, Google being in particular.

Backlinks - These are links that point to your website or webpage, specifically from other websites. Get lots of backlinks. You can create backlinks if you have lots of other websites. But if you don't, then you will need to get other webmasters to add links to your website. Doing this is not easy.

Lots of backlinks has perhaps the second greatest factor on popularity-based search engines. If you can manage to get both optimal anchor text combined with lots of backlinks, your website will no doubt get the top listing for the keywords in the anchor text.

Filenames - when creating creating a webpage, use a filename that includes the most important keywords. Use dashes instead of underscores to separate words. Don't be afraid to create long filenames. If your webpage is about bass fishing tips, then name it "bass-fishing-tips.htm". Don't abbreviate the words.

Note that Blogger, which is owned by Google, uses this same filenaming convention for blogs.

Title Tags - The text within the <TITLE> tags should contain the most important keywords for the page. But take care not to create long titles. Keep them short. Notice that long titles tend not to rank high on SERPs.

Heading Tags and Paragraph Tags - Make sure your document uses the heading tags <h1>, <h2>, etc., and the paragraph tags <p>. This is proper convention for marking content in a webpage. Search engines want to index content, so you need to make sure the search engine robots can identify content when they run across it.

Fresh Content - Search engines seem to now place greater emphasis on websites that constantly add new content to its pages. I think the minimum threshold is one new webpage per day. That is, a website that adds one new webpage per day will get the maximum attention from Google and Yahoo. However, in order to effect this, this content must be featured on your homepage. So, it would help to include some kind of section on your home page that summarizes each new page, content, or article that was added to the website.

Weblogs are excellent tools for effecting this. Create a weblog, and add the weblog component into an existing website. For example, a weblog can take residence on your homepage, but all the other webpages behind it could be static pages, or dynamically created pages from a database.

If you are constantly adding new content to your website, but that new content is not linked or announced from your homepage, Google and Yahoo will never find it. I believe that Google and Yahoo sends robots called "freshbots" to specific pages on your website to look for "fresh content". If your new content is not featured or linked from these pages, then those search engines will just as well consider your website to be stale.

If you cannot do this to your homepage, then consider creating another website whose sole purpose is to feature the new content on your main website. Use a weblogging tool to manage this other website, and use the same SEO tips listed on this page.

Keyword Frequency - Make sure your homepage contains several instances of your most important keywords. But don't over do it. How do you tell if you're overdoing it? Take some time to count your important keywords, and compare them to the number of other words that appear on your homepage. You want to make sure that your desired keywords outnumber the others, but only by a handful. Don't count everyday words like "the", "you", "there", etc.

The best way to control this, is to keep your webpages very simple in design, with very little extraneous text. The more simpler the better, the less extraneous text the better.

Meta Data - Use the Meta Keywords tag and the Meta Description tags. But don't over do it. The keywords should be limited to your most important keywords. Don't stuff it with very remotely related keywords, just your main keywords.

Use Images - Try to make a practice of adding a photo or clipart to each webpage. I'm not referring to the graphic images in your website template. When writing an article, try to incorporate a photograph or clipart drawing to accentuate the article. Then, make sure to add the "Alt" text into the <IMG> tag. This text should contain your most important keywords. Don't worry about using this text to describe the image, instead use it to describe the webpage.

In addition, when assigning the filename for the image, use the most important keywords for the webpage.

Labels: Search Engine Optimization