Top 15 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques I Forget to do

Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic in the World Wide Web. After all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. I have identified and made a list of top 15 SEO practices that I tend to forget quite often. These simple SEO techniques if practiced properly can make a significant difference as to how my pages are ranked in the Search Engine Queries.

•         Use rel=”nofollow” tag on low value links to not pass the page rank juice. For example ‘Read the rest of the entry’, ‘About’, ‘Contact’ etc.

•      Use proper anchor text for interlinks. Don’t use ‘here’, ‘there’ etc for the anchor text (if you can avoid it).

•      Optimize the images, always create alt tags and write description in the alt tag.

•   Use search engine friendly permalinks. Try not to have ‘&’, ‘?’, ‘!’ etc characters in the URL. Sometimes it is unavoidable but try to keep it to a minimum.

•    Use hyphens (-) between words to improve readability.

•   Do not use underscores (_) in URLs, use hyphens (-) instead.

•   Do not use session id in URLs.

•   Use sticky posts.

•   Use tag clouds (if it applies).

•   Have a category description paragraph.

•   Let the visitors subscribe to category specific RSS feed. (Use category specific RSS plugin for WordPress)

•     Use internal linking when possible and appropriate.

•    Use sub-directories rather than sub-domains when possible. Sub-domains do not share link love from the main domain as it is treated as a different domain.

•       Research the target audience and aim the site content appropriately.

•         Keep the content up to date. Visitors don’t like outdated content. Updating the content frequently also attracts the Search engines spiders to index the web pages frequently.

•     Going forward I will try to use this list to optimize my web pages for search engines.

Here is a list of articles you should read to learn more SEO techniques:

•     6 Simple Strategies to Get Blog Posts Indexed Quickly

•     Short All-You-Need Guide to Keyword Density

•    6 SEO Strategies That Can Generate Highly Targeted Traffic

•     Blog Commenting Strategies to Improve Search Ranking