2. Use relevant keywords. Targeting keywords that nobody searches is a dead-end road. Take your topic and think like a person who wants more information on the topic. What string of words would best define his need and be the easiest to type in?
3. Create a sitemap. A well organized sitemap gives the search engine spiders a way to quickly and more efficiently scan and index all of your content.
4. Build your brand. Aesthetics and typography (Blogussion does an incredible job at both) are now a huge deal in the internet world. Create an identifiable logo and blog layout that is memorable. If it looks pleasant to the eyes, it will be much more prone to gaining a quality backlink.
5. Build quality backlinks. Organic backlinks are tough to come by, but if you write good, unique content and promote it, you will gain those coveted links over time. Backlink building never stops. Always look for ways to get a new, quality backlink.
6. Need your blog crawled and indexed? Submit your site to Google, Yahoo! and Bing, but be warned – this can take a long time. Your best bet at getting indexed quickly is getting a quality backlink from a trusted site.
7. Need your blog crawled and indexed frequently? Write fresh content at least two times a week, and make sure that the content is unique in its nature.
8. Modify your permalink structure. Having id=?q133.12PP at the end of your URLs takes up valuable SEO space. Modify your permalink structure so that you can make your links completely relevant to your content. View the link to this page in your search bar for an example.
9. Don’t be afraid to link out to others. If you link out to others, others will be more apt to link back to you. It’s a give and take relationship. Don’t be a mooch.
10. SEO is an art form. There is no one perfect way to optimize your content, only guidelines. So don’t fall for the advertisements that promise #1 rankings in Google. It never works like that.
11. Search engine rankings take time. Don’t expect to rank high the day after you implement your SEO tips and techniques. Give them time to flourish and bloom.
12. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Using Google Webmaster Tools will help you analyze how your blog is doing is terms of search query traffic and indexing. You can analyze your data and modify it appropriately in order to boost your SEO efforts.
13. Target one keyword or keyword phrase for each page. The shotgun approach for keywords just doesn’t give results. Pick one keyword or keyword phrase and stick with it.
14. Take advantage of latent semantic indexing. Latent semantic indexing takes into effect the words that are synonymous with your keywords. So while you specifically target one keyword or keyword phrase, use synonymous words around it in order to give the spiders a better idea of how to index and rank your content.
15. Use 301 redirects for your custom affiliate links. Also add
rel=nofollow to them as well in order to keep your SEO in tact.16. Use lots of internal links. Use your content in order to link to the rest of your content. This helps search engines (and your visitors) navigate your site and discover other relevant content.
17. Submit your blog to directories. While directories are taking the back burner to new social media sites, they still can provide high quality backlinks for your site. Just don’t submit your site to crappy directories. Study them first, then submit.
18. Use keyword rich anchor texts for your links. Anchor text is the text that is displayed within your hyperlinks. Using keyword rich anchor text is important. Also, surround your anchor text with your targeted keywords.
19. Don’t worry over PageRank. PR will come as long as you build quality content and backlinks. PR is just a nice added bonus to all of the other hard work you put into your stuff.
20. If you can afford it, stay away from shared server hosting. It is very unreliable and can hurt your SEO efforts. Try out virtual private server hosting or cloud hosting. However, if you must stick with shared server hosting, do a check to make sure it isn’t on the bad list of Google.
21. Make sure your server headers are functioning properly. You either want to see a “200 ok” or a “301 redirect” message for your URLs. Anything else means there is an inconsistency with your links.
22. Make sure you use ALT tags with your images. Use them to describe your content (and add a few keywords if possible).
23. Check your keyword placement. Are your keywords riddled well throughout your text? Do you have them frequented in the first 100 and last 50 words of your content?
24. Load JavaScript at the bottom of the page. This improves your page load time (and your ranking factor).
25. Enable GZIP compression for your blog. Most web hosting companies will allow this (it is hit and miss with shared server hosting). Enabling compression on your blog reduces and compacts the content of your blog so that it is delivered faster to your visitors.
26. Write awesome guest posts. Send some of your best stuff to other bloggers in your niche. They will generally provide you with a quality backlink to your site.
27. Choose which search engine you want to optimize your content for. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others all have different algorithms to rank content. Choose one search engine and stick with it. Google likes links. Yahoo! and Bing tend to like on-page SEO.
28. Using flash content is not very SEO friendly. If you do use flash content, be sure to create some type of link structure for the spiders to crawl.
29. Be aware of link exchanges. Most of them are crocks and get you bad rapport with the search engines.
30. Find forums that are related to your blog. Become active in the forums and offer your expertise. People in these forums already have something in common with you. Use this opportunity to create loyal visitors.
31. Along with using forums, take that opportunity to place a link in your signature. Most forums add the
rel=nofollow attribute to them, but nevertheless it is a chance to increase your link popularity and visibility. Take advantage of signatures.32. Search engine optimization is a daily process. Be prepared to analyze and tweak your content constantly for best results.
33. Optimize your RSS feeds. You would do this the same way that you would with your actual content.Don’t forget that they are a crucial part of your blog, too.
34. Always use absolute links. Absolute links can be searched by anyone. http://arslion.blogspot.com is an example of an absolute link.
35. Add viral elements to your blog. Use social media buttons for Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and any other social media service you would like. Give your blog the ability to become viral.
36. Make your internal link structure easy to navigate. But don’t just stop there. Make your whole blog easy to navigate. People don’t like sites that give them trouble.
37. Give your visitors something to jabber about. Make your content unique and memorable. If you can do this, the link juice will flow like milk and honey.
38. Always be prepared to answer questions from your visitors. This builds rapport with them and makes them more likely to tell their friends about your blog. In technical terms, remember that grassroots marketing is important.
39. Optimize your backend coding to make sure that it isn’t slowing down your blog. Use the PageSpeed and YSlow tools in order to find out where you have potential issues. If the issues can be fixed, fix them.
40. Make use of headers and bold text in your content. This grabs the attention of your readers and, consequently, the search engine spiders. Don’t go overboard with this, though, unless you want to be ranked #967 for your keyword(s).
41. Make sure that your visitors have the option of social bookmarking. This means you should probably have some social buttons somewhere in your posts.
42. Consider multiple domains. If you believe that you can provide lots of content for two or more related (but different) topics, you may want to try using multiple domains to support each other. This way, you can get good link juice from your domains.
43. We are human beings. We can forget to optimize our content at times. Use some SEO tools like SEO PowerSuite or Scribe SEO to help you to always optimize your content.
44. Go back and optimize some of your old content. If it is not doing well in the search engines, analyze it, tweak it and update it for better rankings in the search engines.
45. If possible, stay away from frames. They can’t link to pages so they create pretty dead-ends. Avoid them if you can.
46. Check your keyword density. Keyword density should be somewhere between 2% and 5% for your content. The only exception to this is if you are trying to make viral content. Even so, still try to fall within this percentage so that the search engines can rank your content well even after it has run its viral course.
47. Stay away from submission services. Just suck it up and do the work yourself. Submission services can come back to haunt you.
48. SEO is a lot of work. Don’t forget that.
49. New blogs (like this one) take time to get ranked for targeted keywords. Don’t get discouraged. Implement your SEO tips and give them time. The rankings and subsequent traffic will come.
50. Are you using a theme for your blog? If so, make sure that it is structured well and does not slow down your page load time. If you use WordPress, consider the Thesis WordPress theme.
51. The quality of your backlinks is always more important than the quanity of your backlinks. 10 quality backlinks can carry more weight than 100 mediocre backlinks.
52. Backlink building takes time, so don’t try to get them all at once. You may get flagged by the search engines if you do otherwise.
53. Communicate with other bloggers in your niche. Get to know them and learn from their past experiences. This will help you learn the ropes and become a better blogger. Becoming a better blogger attracts more long lasting attention and traffic, which will boost your search engine rankings.
54. Use as little JavaScript as possible. JavaScript takes a long time to load and can slow down your blog. Because Google now considers site speed as a ranking factor, you need to make sure that your blog is as speedy as possible.
55. Offer new content often. Spiders do not like stale content. If you yourself cannot write frequently, try to get some guest posts from other people in your niche.
56. Use canonical links. Canonical links make sure that the links that you post are the links that show up in the search engines. You wouldn’t want the comments link showing up for the actual post link, would you?
57. Local is becoming the new thing. If your blog has a local focus, take advantage of it. Submit your site to Google Places and get some of that local traffic to your blog.
58. Use anchor text within your internal links. Using the words “seo tips” would be better than “here” because it lets the spiders know what the content is about when that link is clicked.
59. Backlinks do not help your SEO directly if they have a
rel=nofollow attribute attached to them. If you can, get links without this attribute so that search engines will follow them. However, any type of backlink increases your link popularity, which in turn can create better awareness of your blog, brand and content. Nevertheless, only backlinks without the rel=nofollow attribute give you authentic link juice.60. Title tags are crucial to search engine success. Make sure that you title tags contain your targeted keywords or keyword phrases.
61. Going along with title tags, the closer your keywords are to the beginning of the title, the better. Place your keywords or keyword phrases as close to the beginning as possible.
62. Design your website with SEO in mind. If you don’t do this at the beginning, it is much tougher to implement SEO tips and techniques into your design later.
63. Check your crawl rates on your content with Google Webmaster Tools. If your crawl rate average begins to exceed 1000ms, go back through and optimize your content for speed. If you are still seeing high crawl rates, consider switching hosts.
64. If you can, ditch the index.php or default.htm (or whatever it may be) at the end of your links. This makes your blog look old and outdated. Who wants to link to a blog that is old and outdated?
65. .php, .htm, .html, .asp, etc. at the end of your links have no effect on your SEO, but they do have an effect on your social credibility. With this and point #64 in mind, try to get rid of them if you can.
66. Install Google Analytics on your blog. Study your analytics and find out how to best optimize your content for the traffic that you are receiving (and could be receiving).
67. Your blog aesthetics are becoming increasingly important. Make your design look nice, clean and neat.
68. Remember, remember, remember: SEO takes time. You must be patient and enduring. If you can stick with it, you will do well.
69. Finally, always write your content for your human visitors, not the search engines. I like to think of it this way: search engines are toddlers and visitors are kids. Both are human, but you must communicate to them in different yet equal ways. If you think about it in this light, you will always be looking to satisfy both without compromising the other.
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